As we get closer to the day when Obamacare moves from threat to reality, it seems probable that the resulting catastrophe for tens of thousands of businesses, as well as the massive increase in premiums for many families, will propel Republicans to majority status in 2014.
How many businesses will be forced to close shop? How many will cut back on the number of employees to stay in business? How many will refuse to expand, unable to handle the increased costs?
How many jobs will Obamacare cost?
Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, lays out the grim reality:
Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans.
ObamaCare’s rules make expansion expensive, particularly for the 500,000 US businesses that have fewer than 100 employees.
Suppose that a firm with 49 employees does not provide health benefits. Hiring one more worker will trigger the mandate. The company would now have to provide insurance coverage to all 50 workers or pay a tax penalty.
In New York, the average employer contribution for employer-provided insurance plans, runs from $4,567 for an individual to $ 12,748 for a family. Many companies will likely choose to pay the penalty instead, which is still expensive — $2,000 per worker multiplied by the entire workforce, after subtracting the statutory exemption for the first 30 workers. For a 50-person company, then, the tax would be $40,000, or $2,000 times 20.
That might not seem like a lot, but for many small businesses that could be the difference between survival and failure.
Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn’t the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It’s worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.
New York City’s small business could be particularly hard hit. Of the 238,851 city firms included in a state Department of Labor survey, 96% had fewer than 50 employees. How many of them, given the chance to expand, will look at the mandate and decide they’d rather keep their small business small?
Overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare could end up costing as many as 800,000 jobs.
You read that correctly: 800,000 jobs. And that’s according to the CBO, a notoriously conservative outfit when it comes to projections. (Its current estimate of Obamacare’s cost from 2014-2023 is $2.6 trillion.)
somebody has to pay, and the big joke is that its you who will pay. now everybody say it in unison. look over to the person next to you, just like we’re in church and say to your neighbor’”you will have to pay for obamadon’tcare.
When a radical POTUS (mis)steers the helm, the reconstruction of society becomes the goal, and a significant dependent class must become the majority.And in short order, such a society allows for dictatorial rule. For if the only address with any goods to deliver are Fed overlords, then who is going to argue with this or that dictate?
And it is not as if those who voted in revolutionaries should expect anything less -http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/07/barack-hussein-obamas-deconstruction-plans-green-wise-via-the-economy-disarming-the-citizens-via-gun-control-connecting-the-dots-addendum-to-the-second-term-plans-of-an-obama-presidency-c/
It is not as if this blogger doesn’t understand what is at stake. In fact, having co-owned a highly successful corporate tax practice in the NYC/NJ area,not only will the Radical-in-Chief’s oppressive regulatory machine break the backs of businesses, but Obamacare will be its death kneel. Hiring people will become few and far between.
Alas, a revolutionary gotta do what he gotta do. And those who voted this anti-American in will rue the day!
It is doubtful that the Repubs will be able to repair the damage in 2016. It will be off the hook.
The GOP establishment is complicit
Patrick Fitzgerald and the Kabuki Dance of the Valerie Plame Thing
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2012/11/24/patrick-fitzgerald-and-the-kabuki-dance-of-the-valerie-plame-thing/
Read for comprehension, please. I didn’t find Valerie Plame’s name in the article…
Actually Bill Johnson, you need to work on your reading comprehension…the paragraph directly under the picture of Patrick Fitzgerald.
“Why would he even appoint a Special Counsel at all when Richard Armitage, the man responsible for exposing the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the media, had already confessed and had not even hired an attorney to represent him?”
Yes! Because Demonrats and Repukeicans are different names for the same reptilian predators. Hyper-hypocritically the Boehnerites wail about the Usurper-in-Chief; then roll over and give him whatever dictatorial power he chooses to seize: the NDAA a prime example.
The sad fact that most voters want him in office is disheartening at best and cataclysmic at worst.When did America fall in love with a babykilling sodomist?
The Council on Foreign Relations controls almost everything now, and one consolation is that, when he/it is no longer useful they will torture him publicly until he begs for death. Another is the inevitable Last Judgment, at which his pseudo-christian claims will be rejected.
A company’s mandated costs for employee healthcare policies will ultimately be passed on to those who purchase products and/or services from that company. SImply another shadow tax increase resulting in a transfer of wealth from those who work and produce to those who have chosen to lay up on their neighbors and countrymen.
Did anyone notice tha Romney/Ryan ran as better managers of the Welfare State with regards to Medicare and Medicaid?
That is the future of the “center conservative” GOP….just like all the “cenrist conservative” parties in Europe.
You’ve lost the argument, now you just jockey for power.
This is where we are. obamacare will be like the British NHS, where the conservatives perrenially describe how they can reform it to better management practices….but no one ever talks about scraping it, only extremists. The NHS is now celebrated as inherent to British Identity at Olympics opening ceremonies.
I agree. If the GOP wins only by moving leftward, that is hardly a victory.
On a scale of 1 to 10 in regards to free-market small government ideology, I rate the Democrats as a 1 and the Republicans as a 4.
Not much to get excited about. Keep in mind the reason for this is that women are naturally socialist. They are hardwired to want socialism, for biological reasons (THEY benefit from socialism – it is the man who pays).
For this reason, Democracy always devolves into a female-centric socialism.
Yep, female archtypes coming through the democratic insitutions. They seek economic security and providers. Government is substituting for men, well the men still pay via government confiscation. Women are liberated from the family, fool around, prosecute men they arent attracted to for sexual harassment whilst requiring them to pay for their health care and taking care of their children.
There is so much disfunction in the society, that the whole thing will crash soon.
Holy crap! What kind of crazy neanderthal sh&%heads have I found? Women are hardwired as socialists? Really? You acutally believe something so stupid?
This is why the republican part is doomed.
Relax. Your knee-jerk reaction is not a substitute for a rebuttal. The guy had a point.
Facts can’t be sexist. Apart from the basic drives, there are fundamental differences between men and women in how they view the world and how they seek fulfillment. Ask any psychologist and they’ll tell you the most prized goal for men is respect. They wouldn’t mind love and affection of course. But respect and a feeling of accomplishment compared to their peers which makes them feel dominant is far more satisfying to them.
For women, it’s security, both emotional and physical. That’s why for instance you often see beautiful young women in relationships with older, unattractive but financially secure men yet almost never see the same dynamic with rich women and younger men.
On average, the idea of social safety nets and a benevolent, protective government acting as a surrogate paternal figure is much more appealing on a psychological level to women (particularly single ones) than it is to men. And no amount of politically correct posturing is going to change this overriding truth.
Brian,
If women were not allowed to vote, Romney would be the president. That is a fact, not an opinion. Worse, if single women were not allowed to vote, Romney would be the president. Obama was elected by the Old Maid vote. And yes, it turns out that what unmarried women want is for the government to tax men and give the money to unmarried women.
No women are hardwired to trade a perilous Liberty for Security. For..ever..until recently this was marriage. Now it’s welfare.
Not all women…this woman has been conservative since I started babysitting at age ten (that’s also why I have no children, but that’s a whole nother story…)
However, I will not disagree with you, as we are in the minority. I have five sisters and they all fall into the public employee/ union trough of socialism.
My mom, however is a staunch conservative at age 92.
Well said Mark.
Im tired of being called racist, anti science, and backwards by ignorant fools like Brian.
The Founding Fathers discussed reasons for rejecting universal suffrage, and now we are living the consequences of universal suffrage.
PS – Post WW2 in Europe a massive shortage of men (who were killed in the war) quickly saw the development of the modern Welfare State in the Western Democracies.
Not socialism per se. I read him as saying that most, not all, females have a stronger drive for security than do men, again in general.Our welfare state is a heaven for such and they cost us one trillion dollars a year, state and federal funds combined.They are the Tincuppers, from Tincupper families. As a detective in Los Angeles I knew of many families in which no one had ever worked since 1935.Welfare is a way of life, an “entitlement” to such. And of course they vote for the hand that feeds them. Most know nothing of socialism and probably can’t even spell the word.Welfare of one kind of handout or another is their Sugar Daddy and they hire a corrupt legislature to rob the productive Ones of much of their hardearned monies. So there!
Once again, another “moderate” Republican loses. The GOP only wins when we have a “principled” conservative and not another Democrat lite.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying all along — and when Romney wound up with the GOP nomination I had a feeling that he might not be able to pull off a win precisely because he is a moderate. I hoped he would win, but certainly had my doubts. Historically, moderate GOP nominees for POTUS have not fared well — going at least as far back as Thomas Dewey. Moderate GOPers by definition can’t and don’t present enough of a contrast with liberal Democrats. “Vote for me because I’m not QUITE as bad as the other guy” does NOT an effective campaign message make. You can’t reasonably expect moderates to successfully “sell” the Constitutionally conservative, Madisonian message of limited government because they cannot effectively articulate that message in a way to which the common man can relate. It’s simply not in their “political DNA.” This axiom is even more starkly evident when that moderate’s heritage is one of wealth and privilege.
In more recent history, all 5 moderate GOP nominees since 1976 have lost. In 1976, moderate Gerald Ford lost to liberal Jimmy Carter. In 1988, moderate VPOTUS George H.W. Bush rode Reagan’s coattails to victory — ONCE. Then, in 1992 after governing as the moderate he always was, moderate “Bush 41″ sans Reagan-coattails got flanked by Ross Perot and, of course, lost to moderate-to-liberal Bill Clinton. In 1996, moderate Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton. In 2008, uber-moderate John “King of the RINOs” McCain, of course, lost to Islamo-Socialist Barack Hussein Obama. So, what do the chronic moderates who infest the GOP establishment do in 2012? Why, they nominate another loser moderate, of course! Not only another moderate, mind you, but a wealthy moderate from the Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Taxachusetts, no less! Un-freakin-believable! Now, I do not doubt that Mitt Romney is a good man, but let’s be honest here. He IS and always was, in fact, a moderate — and a poor choice as a nominee.
If the infestation of moderates in GOP “leadership” positions is allowed to continue and if they’re allowed to “s-elect” another moderate nominee for POTUS in 2016, then the Democrats will most likely retain the White House for yet another four years, if not longer. And if the Republicans in Congress continue trying to be Democrat-Lite, then we won’t be able to win back the Senate either and it will be just a matter of time before we lose the House as well. It is up to those of us who are the true conservative voters. The choice is clear: (1) we attempt to salvage the GOP and purge moderates from the ranks of its elected office holders by “primarying” every damn one of them and replacing them with good, solid conservatives; or (2) we write off the GOP and set about the task of raising a formidable new Constitutionally conservative party from its ashes. At this point, I’m beginning to think that we may well have to resort to option 2.
There was not any conservative who was mature, eloquent and disciplined on stage at the Repulican primary debates. It was a menajerie of the childish, the inarticulate, the undisciplined, the scandal-ridden and the left-footed. I liked some of them, but it is obvious that none of them would have beaten the Obama machine. Romney won it by default. I still don’t see a conservative of sufficient caliber on the horizon to win the hearts of his countrymen – some good thinkers, some who might mature well, and collectively a lot of intelligence and talent, but no dragon-slayer.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/deficit-reduction-council-fiscal-cliff_n_2185585.html?ref=topbar
Obamacare tackles the high cost of American health care from the wrong end. While the private insurance industry does deserve some of the blame, the major source of high US health care costs is the federal government itself. By turning medicine into a federally enforced monopoly independent of the cost controlling features of the free market, Americans end up paying far more than anyone else living anywhere else on Earth! As Ronald Reagan pointed out, “Government is the problem”. Laws and regulations enforced by the federal and state governments make health care cost far more expensive than it actually needs to be. A good first step would be the repeal of prescription laws for most medications, leaving only the narcotics and addictive drugs on the prescription list. For many people this would result in a savings of hundreds of dollars a year.
You cannot repeal Obamacare because one in seven Blacks, one in ten Hispanics and one in twelve Italians (thank Fumento) have HIV AIDS and desperately need it to afford medication and treatment.
We are already seeing massive cuts in jobs and work hours as a result of Obamacare.
This will reach the point of total economic collapse very soon.
the fiscal cliff is a win win for Obama, he don’t care because he will blame the republicans, for the taxes going up on the middle class . he told us all thru the campaign, that he cared about the middle class and the republicans didn’t, so now the taxes will crush the middle and he will spin it like fast and furious and bengazigate. this is the preliminary information we received and it was the truth to the best of our knowledge.
It is interesting to listen to Democrats howl and wail that letting the current temporary tax rates expire represents a huge increase in taxes on the middle class. When these temporary tax cuts were first debated all we heard were Democrats howling and wailing that they were only tax cuts for the rich and did so little for the middle class as to be meaningless.
I remember on Dem complaining that it wan’t even enough to buy a muffler for your car.
I would say I’m stunned by the hypocrisy, but were talking about Democrats.
Quite right. If there is one thing the elections of 2008 and 2012 have showed it is the people prefer a lie that let’s live with their pleasant illusions than facing a difficult truth.
Only fools and the most self deluded would, after listening to Mitt Romney, associate him with truth.
Actually the fools and self-deluded ones were the zombies who voted for the hopenchange messiah not once, but twice.
The old media will not portray Democrats as responsible for the failure. They will blame corporate greed, intransigent GOP Governors, or a House of Representatives blocking the necessary “adjustments”. Combined with the class warfare tactic of mobilizing the recipients of government healthcare largess as a voting block, a political realignment towards the GOP due to Obamacare is not at all certain.
This. Not at all certain, but unlikely. Chronic high unemployment ala Europe is the new norm. And you dont vote against your government benefits when you dont have a job. More dependency begets more Democrat-Leftwing voters.
Chronic high unemployment is becoming the norm following austerity in the face of economic crisis.
Want to prolong an economic crisis? Take demand out of an economy with austerity.
However the countries least affected-those in Norther Europe-still have better bond ratings and fatter welfare systems than the US.
America’s trade imbalance is one of the major reasons we have so much unemployment today. We are like a consumer running up a credit card balance that he or she is unable to pay off. The eventual consequences of this will definitely be unpleasant! The Adam Smith avocation of free trade was based upon the idea of trade among relatively equal nations so far as the cost of living was concerned. It was understood by Americans from the time of the founding of this country until after World War 2 that tariffs were a necessary part of maintaining a high American standard of living. Historically the Republican Party was the party of tariffs while the Democrats (especially in the South) supported free trade because they could import manufactured goods from England cheaper than buying them from American manufacturers in the North. Those who have studied their American history will know and understand these facts. Unfortunately the Republican Party of today is no longer supportive of maintaining a high standard of living here in the USA… There is a considerable difference between a “free market” and allowing the USA to be the dumping ground for manufacturers whose cost of production is a small fraction of our own. Unfortunately the Libertarian Party has forgotten what made the US the best country for Americans. Importing most of our consumer goods may allow the Walmart shoppers to buy more “stuff” than they could if the same items were “Made in the USA”, but the quality of what you buy today is much inferior. Yes, the Chinese work “cheap”, but the quality of their work leaves much to be desired…
In fact, that’s what has happened in Massachusetts with RomneyCare.
The cost of premiums has soared (mine rose over 40% in just a few years), and hospitals are cutting back over RomneyCare’s low reimbursement rates.
But despite all that, RomneyCare has not become one bit less popular. Instead, Governor Patrick and the Dems are having a field day railing against “greedy insurers,” and placing a flat cap on how much they can charge in premiums.
What will happen with ObamaCare is that the liberals will say “See? The problem with ObamaCare is that it relies on people purchasing private insurance”–and then they will make their pitch for a government-only single-payer system.
Romneycare isn’t working out very well?
That’s not what Mitt Romney told me, and I have it on good authority that he’s a man of great honesty and integrity.
Right…this election featured the martyrdom of an unfailingly honest man of deep intregrity, steadiness and constancy.
As the Wehrmacht said in 1940 “Abandoned Peoples, Put your trust in the German Soldier.”
Obamacare would have been “single payer” to start with if it hadn’t been for the private insurance industry. Who after they are “squeezed enough”, will end up going out of business leaving the federal government as the “payer”. Instead of seeing a doctor for routine things, you’ll be seeing a nurse practitioner instead. Most people probably won’t be effected, but for those with more complex problems, you will find long waiting times to see the fewer doctors still in practice. That seems to be the way things work out with national single payer systems.
All this is a pipe dream.I speak from experience,this what happened in Australia under Gough Withlam and later on with Bob (old snake eyes) Hawke.You forget to take into account the credulity and mostly the stupidy of the people,the so called “true believers” who don’t want to accept or see the facts.They live in a delisunional world. These people will only realise long after the final crash.
Bingo. We’ll be accused of violating “the spirit” of ObamaCare, such a spirit apparently being the willing provision of services for free, just like The LightWorker promised. And if you don’t provide them, you’re just a greedy racist. Oh, they’ll blame us, all right. And I too am not at all convinced that the impending catastrophe will be blamed on those who caused this problem.
Exactly right. The Obozo machine will demagogue the disaster they created into the fault of the Republicans, the Republicans will defend themselves as ineptly as ever, and the Demo-toady media will cover for the Obozo machine’s failure as always. The idea that Obozocare’s massive failure will turn into Republican victory is wishful fantasy.
The big trick will be Republicans playing this right and getting their message out. Obama and the Democrats will never admit to Obamacare being anything but wonderful. They’ll claim that the massive job losses and recession are still somehow Bush’s fault, or they’ll blame house Republicans for not letting them raise taxes or spend as much as they wanted. When businesses come right out and say that Obamacare is the reason they’re not hiring, the Dems will portray them as Kulaks trying to foil the great one’s plans. The media are a bunch of vile toadies and will go along with it every step of the way. In addition to repeating Democrat’s lies they’ll also lie by omission. Instead of talking about the latest jobs report, or the latest credit downgrade, or the soaring cost of health insurance, they’ll run sob stories of some woman with cancer who was “saved” by Obamacare.
This is still going to be an uphill fight against the lies and disinformation machine, but for the country’s sake I really hope this article is right.
I should add that the Republican party’s consistent opposition to this travesty of a bill would be a strong asset in any sane political system, but it may not be in ours. The Dems and media will paint the narrative that Obamacare failed only because the Republicans didn’t support it and tried to sabotage it. They’ll point to things like the filibusters trying to block it, or the lawsuits against it, or the GOP governors refusing to participate. Nevermind that these events have absolutely no effect on the damage the bill causes, the narrative will become that Obamacare would’ve worked flawlessly if only those ignorant Republicans had seen Obama’s bold vision and not tried to stand in the way. Then they’ll promise that with 4 more years Hillary can fix it. The truth is not in their nature and pushing the truth past them will be difficult.
The big trick will be Republicans playing this right and getting their message out.
Then we’re screwed.
Until we have purple fingers, paper ballots, and picture IDs at EVERY election, it won’t MATTER how many people we can persuade.
The “margin of fraud” keeps getting wider with every election. When it is this easy to steal elections, we don’t HAVE a republic.
I am retired. I still do a little contracting, mostly for fun and a little profit. I had/ have a chance to grow it and thus sell it to someone as a starter-business. Kiss that goodbye, America.
BTW, instead of spending time and effort innovating products and services, most small businesses will spend devote their energy toward finding the inevitable legal loopholes in O’care. For example, as a private citizen I can own independent business units of, say, 45 folks each.
ta
Rick:
You’re assuming a fair election is to be had in 2016. No way, baby. The Marxists are not giving the country back in any future you can foresee; it took them decades to get in. That’s why it’s a tragedy that so many American idiots stayed away from the polls believing they’d have an opportunity later. There is no ‘later’: it’s Marxists all the way down, from here on out.
Frankly, I’m surprised the Left “won” the election by means of mere vote fraud; I did not put it past them to resort to physical violence. Why do you think they don’t give a damn about public opinion? The answer is that they ddon’t need to.
I suppose we’ll wake up some sunny day to find that Obummer has proclaimed all power unto himself. His buddy Mursi did it – why not him too?
“If you like your dictator, you can keep your dictator.”
It’s time for the red states to bail out and leave DC and the big cities to stew in their own juices.
Of course, everything the article points out about Obamacare is true, and its effects will be nothing short of catastrophic. Ocare’s ultimate goal has never been the provision of low-cost health care insurance to anyone. Ocare’s ultimate goal is the utter destruction of the current health care insurance market, and its replacement by the nanny state.
While I can HOPE that the article is correct in that Ocare will swing things toward the Republican party, I have strong doubts. Articles like this one tend to shortchange the still-powerful influence of what we eagerly (wishfully?) call the “old media.” They are directly responsible for O’s re-election, with their determined and shameless propaganda effort. It may blow one’s mind that a million or more American TV viewers would tune in to MSNBC, for example, for any reason, but they did, and they saw exclusively negative “news” coverage of Romney in the last week of the campaign, and exclusively positive “news” coverage of O during the same period. There was no pretense of fairness in the coverage, but so what? If you’re so irretrievably stupid as to rely on MSNBC for your news, you’re not worthy of your right to vote in the first place.
The GOP killed itself when it broke it’s own rules and committed fraud. It will never come ‘back’ until it begins honoring our constitution again. How many of our own GOP reps voted for the NDAA?
Saxsby Shameless from Ga. just decided to ditch his own anti tax pledge, and sadly, that is the kind of representation we’ve come to expect from the gop.
Taxes are a different issue completely.
Take a look at the budgets and tax levels over the last few decades.
Cutting taxes did NOT force the Government to cut spending. Instead, cutting taxes was often followed by the Government spending even more. Not once did an across-the-board tax cut lead to a significant Government spending cut. Not once.
Raise taxes, spending goes up.
Cut taxes, spending still goes up.
I would say that Obamacare SHOULD make the GOP a majority party, but I do not believe it WILL make it so. Romney should have won the election, yet he did not. The American people knew exactly what they were getting with Obama. They looked at the wreckage of our economy and the unending high unemployment and the gaffes and the lying and the rank amateurishness and the Chicago-style deep dish corruption and said “Yep, I want another helping of that!”
My co-workers are overwhelmingly liberal, and I did not know another person among the 200 or so that I work with who voted Republican. Many of them are also part-timers, so they will be in that sad lot who will see their hours drastically cut so that we don’t incur any penalties. They will go on Food Stamps and, in 2016, vote Democrat. That, I fear, is the future. Pray God I am wrong.
Mr. Moran and other GOP pundits simply do not get it. They do not understand American politics.
Obamacare will result in more unemployment and economic destruction, yes. And in response the Obama Democrats will continue to hand out checks and aid payments to all of the disparate minority groups which make up their winning coalition. As the economy gets worse, these people will become even more dependent on Federal government handouts, which will cement them still further as Democrat voters. This is the exact same political strategy FDR used in the New Deal. It is the natural strategy of an autocratic regime which distributes private goods to specific groups rather than creating public goods for the whole selectorate. After FDR was elected, Democrats controlled the White house for 5 straight terms. That’s 20 years.
Ultimately a continuation of these policies will result in there being nothing left with which the Democrats can buy votes. When that day comes, if the moderate, centrist, nice-guy Republicans are still around, the Democrat electorate will blame them for not magically creating new wealth to be redistributed amongst the entitlement class.
And people like Mr. Moran, whose obtuse myopia prevents him from learning from history, are part of the problem.
You speak the truth. Unfortunately, the democrats as always will find a way to make the low information voters believe that it is the big bad evil republicans fault and most likely it will work. Sorry for being pessimistic, but most people don’t live by rational thought.
I’ve read where the republicans sign an agreement with the democrats back in 1982 that stated the republicans would not investigate democrat voter fraud nor would republicans use voter fraud for their own yet the democrats are legally allowed to commit voter fraud without repercussions.
If this is so the GOP is screwed and self screwed.
I don’t see a republican winning any elections above state level and I expect even then voter fraud will take them out of politics completely.
The votes for Obama and democrats will continue to grow while the republicans will never get the votes again, fraud, intimidation and the hunting of republican supporters for revenge.
The sad part is the republicans believe they can still be taken seriously.
This was more than just a lost election this was the end of the republicans as we knew them from now on they will be democrats with an R after their names.
The US will become a socialist country, the constitution will become just an old 200 year old document.
Single party system with republicans as jokers and court jesters to be made fun of.
The voters got screwed, I got screwed and my vote doesn’t count when it’s stacked against mass fraud.
Holy sheep dip! You are correct! I thought you may have been a Colorado ” recreational ” voter, but you’re absolutely right. I took the time to look it up and was flabbergasted! Since 1982! I think that may have been an early, and BIG nail in this country’s coffin. And if lil’ Barry Obumble gets just one more SCOTUS appointment it will never be overturned. We are so toast.
Wow! I’d never heard of that. Why aren’t more right leaning pundits raising a stink about it? How ridiculous.
What if Libertarians were to start demanding investigations into voter fraud. Or independents? Isn’t there an unaffiliated group at all interested in taking this on? Unbelievable.
Here’s a link to a story about the 1982 agreement: http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/gop-legally-barred-from-fighting-vote-fraud/
first I’d like to say its refreshing to read comments that have a good degree of sense as well as education to them. I’ve enjoyed reading. I saw a 1988 interview of Ron Paul on a news program on you tube yesterday , he said then that it’s already a one party government, that no matter who is in office , the ones who really run everything stay put to continue their work , I cant remember all of who he mentioned but the trilateral commission was one , I think the federal reserve was another, but he spoke of a lot of the stuff that is now going on back in 88 ,it was quite shocking to see
Further burnishing the label as The Stupid Party.
We are screwed blued and tattooed folks. Time to retire and let the marxists have total control or start a new party that isn’t shackled by such stupidity.
But I thought the election of Obama, the passage of Obamcare, the war on energy, etc., were supposed to bring the GOP to a sweeping majority. Wasn’t the threat of Obama packing the Supreme Court with liberals supposed to bring Conservatives out in droves?
The Grand PooBahs of the RNC must be smoking a lot of stuff liberally laced with hubris and megalomania to keep believing that junk. The worse the economy gets, the more people will turn to the Democrats and the more hard core existing Democrats will get. They’ll blame everyone BUT Obama and the Democrats for their failings and then things will get nasty.
What will help Conservatives get back in power will be to get rid of the corrupt kingmakers of the RNC, replace them with real and articulate Conservatives and put up a candidate the base will like and trust and can speak plainly so even Democrats can understand him.
“The Grand PooBahs of the RNC must be smoking a lot of stuff liberally laced with hubris and megalomania to keep believing that junk. The worse the economy gets, the more people will turn to the Democrats and the more hard core existing Democrats will get. They’ll blame everyone BUT Obama and the Democrats for their failings and then things will get nasty.
What will help Conservatives get back in power will be to get rid of the corrupt kingmakers of the RNC, replace them with real and articulate Conservatives and put up a candidate the base will like and trust and can speak plainly so even Democrats can understand him.’
I’ve seen this movie before, it was called: “The Seventies”. The Nixon Recession of 1971 led right into the Arab Oil Embargo fo 1973 and good ole Stagflation for the rest of the decade.
It lasted until Ronald Reagan tamed the unions in the PATCO strike and subsequent firings, bulit up the Navy and Armed Forces and cut taxes.
Not that Reagan was all the Conservative that he’s been painted as by history, but he was close enough for what was needed. The fact that they renamed Washington’s National airport AND the largest Federal office building in the District is rather ironic, given RR’s rhetoric.
“What will help Conservatives get back in power will be to get rid of the corrupt kingmakers of the RNC”
Ain’t gonna happen, unless the Tea Party types adopt Alinsky-like brass-knuckle tactics and take over the RNC by force. Trying to work within the current system won’t cut it anymore.
Here is Massachusetts RomneyCare, the prolog to ObamaCare, has been in place since 2006. There have been some positives: everyone can now join a health plan (notice I didn’t say insurance plan) even with pre-existing conditions, the world-class hospitals in Boston and environs are accessible to nearly all, and low income individuals and families not covered under an employer-based plan can access a state-subsidized plan. The negatives, predicted by everyone with any knowledge of human nature and a basic understanding of economics are now upon us. The costs are astonomical and rising faster the the state’s GDP. The Tufts Health Plan my wife and I have carried for the last 11 years has more than doubled in cost–the largest increases coming since 2006. Our cost for 2011 totaled $19,000–$24,000 with doctor and drug co-pays. The state subsidies come out of general funds (i.e. taxes) but those buying individual plans are subsidizing others to a significant extent (as are companies who provide for their employees).
The costs have become so alarming that Governor Deval Patrick (Obama Prolog) and the legislature passed legislation that will give the Governor authority to cap spending (public AND private) at the level of GDP growth with the “assistance” of a special commission. That’s the first step of rationing.
Its not a pretty picture.
There’s almost always a way around that stuff. The government in general has taxed the sh*t out of cigarettes, in WA state they were north of $10 per pack. However, people who drove across state lines, bought loose tobacco in bulk, then rolled their own cigarettes or smoked a pipe were able to smoke for a tiny fraction of the cost, probably less that $1-$2 per pack equivalent.
This goes back to a very relevant point though which is that once the government pays for the care of your body they effectively own you an can dictate behavior as they please. It is not a pretty picture.
Sorry, This was meant to be a reply to the comment below, number 13
How much Federal tax dollars have been spent to keep the MA plan going? I know it was the Left’s strategy to prop it up long enough to get the Unaffordable Care Act passed, sadly, conservatives failed to make this point known to voters. Congress should cut all funding from the MA plan.
The expansion of the Massachusetts plan was originally funded from Medicare reimbursements, so it was federal money in a perverse sense. Patrick and the supermajority poured in all kinds of goodies effectively mandating a cadillac plan for everyone that covers virtually everything. Medicare reimbursements are no longer a funding mechanism so you can see the problem. Romney’s original universal coverage plan provided for a simple “skin and bones” catastrophic plan for the uninsured subsidized by everyone else, but this being Massachusetts the supermajority did it the “Massachusetts way,” something akin to the “Chicago Way.” We’re also paying for free Cadillac plans for about 100K illegal immigrants.
I don’t think you can blame Romneycare for the increases. I’m in NY where we don’t have it and the increases in our insurance plans have been the same and the rates are identical.
Obamacare will take your hobbies and use the health care to forbid you from doing what the Gov says is not allowed, rock climbing, parachuting, motorcycles, base jumping or Hang gliding? Gov health care won’t cover it, we are going to have every dangerous habit or hobby culled from our lives if the Gov is providing health care.
What they did to tobacco products and the users they can do to anything deemed to be dangerous.
Risk needs to be priced into everything we insure. That’s just free market working. Why should I pay more for insurance so that some Michael Moore can be fat, lazy and stupid?
I know plenty of average citizens with no political affiliations who do not understand mandatory health insurance.
It’s like mandatory auto insurance if you own a car you must have insurance whether you can afford that insurance or not.
If your not able to buy insurance then what happens?
You won’t be seeing a doctor and the Gov has a plan to persuade you to buy their insurance, or else.
Hey Rick Moran, DREAM ON !!
Look at Argentina and Venezuela where the leaders of those nations have successfully divided the citizenry, excelled in utilizing hand outs to bribe the electorate, and created sufficient class envy that despite the disastrous economic policies pursued by Chavez and Kirchner, they keep getting re-elected.
When the majority of voters can vote to confiscate for themselves the fruits of the productive segments of society, then that WILL mark the end of a democracy.
Obama’s re-election is clearly an indication that the events in Venezuela and Argentina are being replicated here in the USA.
And the changing population will accelerate this process.
If you wonder about the talk of secession, well, wonder no longer. The handwriting is on the wall in big, fat, capital letters.
This comment typifies the delusional, counter-factual mindset of reactionaries. Argentina has outperformed every other economy in the western hemisphere during the tenure of the Kirchner’s, averaging 8% annual GDP growth. The unemployment rate has dropped from over 25% in 2002 to less than 7% today. Industrial production has more than doubled, and exports have quadrupled over this time. Poverty has fallen dramatically, income inequality has dropped to among the lowest in the hemisphere, and virtually every indicator of well-being (i.e., health outcomes and life expectancy) has improved.
If this is your idea of failure, I’d hate to live in what you consider to be a successful economy.
Argentina is also the most biologically white of the Latin American nations. Imagine how off the charts it would be if say the Swedes, Flemish or Germans got there before the PIGS crowd. When Tony didnt get his TO:NY stamp at Ellis Island, he went far south.
I have to agree with most of the posters here. I doubt that things will significantly turn for the Republicans. Now, this doesn’t mean they can’t score some pickups in ’14, or even have a decent shot at the presidency in ’16, if a less iconic Dem is nominated (I doubt that Gore or Kerry, had they been the incumbent, would have inspired such high minority turnout). But I don’t think it will be enough to undo this disaster. The Dems will find a way to preserve it, and the blue states, no matter how bad things are, will never elect enough GOP Senators to overturn it.
The best thing I can do is be thankful that I have a pretty good job with a large, stable and profitable company, that I’ve long been considered a top performer who they’ve pulled strings to keep when the easy thing would have been to let me go, and that I do have an insurance plan that complies with Obamacare. Not that it’s guaranteed indefinitely, but I’m in about as good a situation as can be expected.
If there is any justice is this, it’s that the demographic groups and states that voted for Obama will get a long spanking with a wooden spoon. Sure, there’s some collateral damage that will affect my fellow conservatives, but at least it will disporportionately fall on those responsible.
oh no.
this sounds just like when libertarians thought it would be a good idea to punish the country and let Obama win in 2008. Losing is not winning.
When the Republicans can start being conservative again and stop pandering to the left, you might see us Libertarians start voting again. I actually recently changed my party from R to L because I’m sick of the lack of focus on limited govt. I am also deeply religious but can’t fathom the fascination of govt involved in religion. The R’s have also lost touch with the constitution and have embraced a stolen liberty platform (Patriot act, NDAA). The R’s can become very succesful if they would focus on a message that is actually different than the D’s. For now it has become one party. Not much of a choice. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The piece wrongly assumes that the Republicans are the only other game in town, and that everybody’s going to run into the arms of a weepy Mama Boehner.
If the Republicans don’t realize that they have a branding and messaging problem (or if they DO, and their solution is to move LEFT), there won’t be much of a Republican party in 2016.
Oh, sure, there will be a huge framework made up of the nuts and bolts GOP personnel. There just won’t be anyone inside.
I agree. When Boehner et al give in to their “superiors” and vote for higher tax rates and spending, the Republican Party will begin a quick disintegration. The Tea Party movement may form an actual political Party, or people may turn to the Libertarian Party, but Boehner and his pals are going to have a short shelf life.
Lest one forget obama weeped when he won. So cut out the crap on eating our own!
wept.
The GOP has been using the same Roe vs. Wade talking points for 40 years… seen any movement at the national level? And we’ve been talking about smaller government for 30 years, deficit reduction for 20 years, plus fixing Social Security for 30 years. It’s almost as if the GOP isn’t really serious… they are, just not about reducing the deficit, cutting spending, fixing the entitlements, abortion or, now, ObamaCare.
Expect the same from ObamaCare; it’ll be a great campaign and money raising issue but nothing will ever happen to materially impact the implementation. ObamaCare will fail and then we’ll move to a nationalized health care scheme because everything else will be too expensive thanks to all the new regulations.
The worse the better. The American people should drink it all. Maybe the following hangover will make them think.
Unless democrat party voter fraud and vote manipulation is stopped…the GOP will never have control ever again.
The more ObamaCare fails, the more Obama and Dems will blame the health care insurers, physicians and employers who provide coverage for their employees. Assuming the Obama does not ignore Constitution, he will have Michelle run in order to complete his plan to provide every American coverage, “We can’t let the wealthy get the good care. We gotta make sure that the poor black kid in Harlem gets the same care as those fat cats on Wall Street.” He & she will call for nationalizing health insurers and putting all doctors in federal civil service. The two grifters will advocate making things worse in order to presumably make it better. Michelle and Hillary will,be locked in a vicious Democratic primary battle centered on who can best provide nationalized health, dental and long-term care. The GOP will hopefully have a candidate who can counter this madness, but at the moment, I do not know who.
Not mentioned in article is the rise in state and local property taxes to pay for the healthcare of active and retired city, county and state employees. These soaring local taxes will further deplete disposable income thanks to ObamaCare. The future does not look bright, thanks to less than bright voters.
“The more ObamaCare fails, the more Obama and Dems will blame the health care insurers, physicians and employers who provide coverage for their employees.”
And the reason this works is because the overwhelming majority of the voters are the aptly-named “low information” types who easily absorb the sound bites that the Democratic machine is so well-versed in exploiting.
Appealing to higher principles, like more limited government, is a losing proposition with such voters. On top of these voters, add the ones who want to ensure their share of government cheese keeps coming, and you have a guaranteed electoral majority.
IOW, barring something cathartic to the system, we’re fooked for the near- and long-term.
Nothing against you, Rick – I could have put the post on any number of threads. But I don’t believe anything any more.
When it comes to cause-effect, we are going to get what they want to do to us, and that’s all there is to it. There were a bunch of very good reasons not to elect Obama again, but look what happened. It doesn’t even matter if the election was legit or not – either way, we’re going to go down the tubes, with all our small amounts of money and assets and freedoms taken away incrementally but inexorably.
Everything all the pundits talked about for the last four years, and everything we the commenters posted about, all came to nothing. There is no rationality left. Civil discourse – none of that left either, at least toward our side. And likely, imo, to only get worse.
So I find it kind of hard to read these reasoned pieces anymore, because I know none of it matters. You can take everything our side thought about and wrote before the election and toss it in the trash. So why should I read it now?
Ouch. So true. Chin up, however. We still have some fight in us and the future is not certain. Don’t quit.
With respect, as a native and conservative Californian, I have learned that Democrats are like battered wives, constantly going back to their abuser because time and time again because they say they will change their ways and fix what they broke. But of course, they never do, and the abuse only gets worse.
This is how the Democrats have turned California from the envy of the land and the 5th largest economy in the world into a bankrupt laughing-stock in just 30 years. over regulation, draconian taxes and a decision to make the non-working class our most valuable resource.
You have more faith then I do in the intelligence of the electorate to see the problem, identify the culprit and them switch to the other party. Particularly now that racialists have decided to tar the GOP as “too white”. Look at the faces of the picketers at most union strikes and you see middle-aged minorities, most with a high school diploma if that and ginned up on socialist and class-warfare rhetoric.
Hostess did what I think more companies will do in the future, and that is fold up the tent. In the case of Hostess, those making the bread are now standing in line for it, and will never have as good a job again.
There used to be a symbiosis between labor and industry, but the relationship turned parasitic, and in many cases, the parasite ultimately kills the host.
Bunk. I don’t believe any of this. Americans HAD their chance on November 6. Don’t you get it? American VOTED for socialism. Americans knew how bad Obamacare was back in 2010, when they turned out in droves to protest it and destroy the Democrats in the midterm elections. Well, Obamacare didn’t change, it didn’t get any better, it didn’t get any simpler, and it certainly didn’t make any more sense. Yet Americans still turned out in droves and re-elected Obama. Worse, the conservatives that should have turned out to vote for Romney stayed home. So if the sick jerks that stayed home did so as a “protest,” then they can’t complain when Obamacare kicks in. I hope they choke on it.
The government will do what the government has always done. Obamacare WILL fail initially, but it will then add layers upon layers of bureaucracy to pay for it and hire thousands of petty bureaucrats to implement it. Obamacare will probably triple in cost, forcing us to spend less and less on defense, until our military will look as pathetic as the one France has.
Eventually, people who don’t have any insurance now will get some form of lousy or minimal-care insurance but, hey, it’s better than what they have now which is nothing. So they’ll keep voting for the Democrats to keep this pathetic excuse for health care coming to them. Meanwhile, everybody else can just sit there and suffer as the entire health care industry starts to collapse. Insurance companies will not be able to compete against a government that can print its own money, so they will eventually get out of the health care business and allow the government to institute a single-payer plan, or total socialized medicine. And then it will be too late. What’s the point of repealing Obamacare after that if there are no insurance companies willing to insure people anymore? Obamacare will be the defacto insurance coverage for everyone and our healthcare will be as crappy as it is in England.
THAT is what we have to look forward to. And if you think any of the RINOs out there like Christie or Rubio or Jindal are going to change any of that, you’re dreaming. The Republican establishment is going to become just a lighter version of the Democratic party, spending tons of money, just not as much as the Democrats. Big deal.
No, America belew its last chance this year to save the nation. Romney wasn’t perfect, but he was a heck of a lot better than Obama. Elections DO have consequences, so now America has to live with them. Hope the voters are happy with what they get.
Sadly,the uninformed and low informed voters do not know how bad OCare is, by design the nasties were supposed to kick in after the election. The GOP failed to get the message out as to how bad this law is, they used high level talking points and relied on insider consultants to make the ads and run a weak campaign.
The public has been dumbed down, they rely on the Democrat Media Complex and voted for the “cool” candidate who put “children” on their parent’s plan up to age 26.
“they rely on the
DemocratLeni Riefenstahl Media Complex”FIFY
With Mittens as nominee we were guaranteed to lose on this one. He was the one Republican who couldn’t make a case against Obamacare. I blame all the stupid Republican primary voters who were overly impressed with Romney’s money. They should have nominated Santorum or Gingrich.
That is funny! We all know that the low-information voters are trashy republicans……ha ha ha!
If a majority of Americans voted to make murder legal, would that make it so? How about armed robbery legal? It would be OK to kill someone and take their stuff, unless of course they shoot back and kill you first.. Why not vote for that? You suggest that anything can be VOTED on by idiot people and that makes it the law of the land. So why then have a government at all?
This ‘voted for socialism’ crap is about the dumbest ass thing I hear morons drone on about.. Let’s do this next.. just take a vote to toss out the US Constitution, all of it, completely rip it up and flush it. Then vote one last time to ‘vote the last time’. No more voting, no more elections. Whoever is in power now, stays there.. How could that go wrong, right? Apparently the people in power are who the voters want in power so why not make it permanent.
Oh, one more thing, I suggest the moron voters repeal the name “The United States of America”.. and replace it with “The Socialist Collection of Stupid Morons of Planet Earth”.
If there is one culprit in this mess are The Republicans. Let’s take for example Al Franken race in Minnesota. We all know Al STOLE the election fair and square. And what The GOP did nothing. If he didn’t win it wouldn’t be Obamacare. Or Scott Brown of Massachusetts who voted for Dodd Frank monster, and still lost the election. If he didn’t voted for it we wouldn’t have this crushing regulations. Those are just the few. If The republicans have any future they must start opposing everything Obama and Democrats do and be prepare do defend it to the end.
In a Just and Rational universe this article would be right on target.
Have to agree with EscapeVelocity. I wish it were not the case, but once people see a benefit as being a good or service supplied by the government, nothing short of complete collapse will cause them to think otherwise. We had our chance to avert disaster and the American people chose disaster over responsibility. So be it.
As seen from overseas,the majority of the citizens voted for Obama.Obama won and he certainly knows it better than anyone,through fraud.
“The GOP will be blameless in this fiasco.”
While I agree with your article, I have to throw the BS flag on that line. The President cannot spend a nickle without the consent of congress.
If the house caves, as it has so far, the Republican’s will be just as much to blame for a coming recession as they were for the last one.
“The President cannot spend a nickle without the consent of congress.”
But without a budget (something we haven’t had in 3 years), the House is powerless to exercise that Constitutional check.
Why do you think Harry Reid won’t allow a budget to come to the Senate floor? Because the Administration has figured out a way to wire around that “power of the purse.”
Yet SOMEONE in the House keeps voting on the “spending bills.” Thus, the STUPID party IS complicit because they won’t exercise their power to stop the spending. They’re scared of the media backlash.
Since universal health care systems are far cheaper and better than purely private ones, I expect that Obamacare, far from hurting the Democrats, will eventually be embraced by Republican pols who want to keep their jobs. Of course you could imagine a different outcome if the process of transition to a rational health care system is mismanaged or the Conservatives somehow manage to torpedo it, but most likely the Tea Party types of 2050 will be chanting “Keep your hands off my Obamacare!”
from the false, all things follow
The only certain thing is change. Yee haw.
Don’t be silly, it’s Rubio’s fault.
60+% voters opposed Obamacare, Obama won, Dems gained more Senate seats. A fake Indian who practised law without license will be making laws to lord over us.
Don’t count on voters to think logically or connect the dots. It’s someone else’s fault, not theirs for electing the same people forcing Obamacare on us.
The Republicans don’t deserve to be the majority party, nor do the Democrats. The people are always the losers, and they deserve to be.
Moran is a delusional Country Club Republican.
The GOP will never be in power again, not for the rest of the century.
The GOP is going the way of the Whig Party. They should put on powdered perfumed wigs. Could you imagine John Boehner in white stockings with a wig? I think that’d be great.
White people, Christians, and married couples are all decreasing as a share of the population and electorate.
Hispanics, Asians, Immigrants, Blacks, “Nones”, and “never married” are all growing as a share of the population and electorate.
The GOP faces an existential crisis.
In 1960, Americans of European ancestry were 88.6% of the population. Today, they are only 63% of the population — and falling rapidly.
In 1980, European-Americans were 88% of the electorate. In 2012, European-Americans were down to only 72% of the electorate — and falling rapidly.
Due to their changing demographics Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona will soon flip, permanently, to the Dems. The GOP will be out of power, forever. We will have a one-party system. The GOP will be irrelevant, a permanent minority.
Additionally, the Democrat Party is the anti-white male party. But white males are only 31% of the population. In a one-man, one-vote democracy, how can they defend themselves from nearly 70% of the population? Answer: They can’t.
The 2012 election was a tale of two vastly different electorates.
Group 1 compromised 72% of the electorate, and voted for Romney 59-39.
Group 2 compromised 28% of the electorate, and voted for Obama 80-18.
What does that tell you?
And white men are increasingly voting like a minority group. They voted 62-35 for Romney.
BTW, WHITE WOMEN voted for Romney by 14 points, 56-42. And WHITES, 18-29, voted for Romney by 7 points 51-44.
In Mississippi whites voted for Romney, 89-10 & blacks voted for Obama, 96-4. Since whites voters outnumbered black voters, 59-36, Romney inevitably won.
Question: As whites decrease as a share of the population and electorate, as they head towards minority status in the early 2040s, are they less likely or more likely to vote increasingly as a bloc.
What does this mean for the United States?
What does it mean for the US?
How about if I tell you what it means for the Republican party.
It means that the party will be forced to stop trying to fear-monger as if minorities and the poor (who are used as politically correct surrogates for minorities) are enemies of America.
The party will have to support policies that are needed by a wider range of people, and all you paranoid, fear-mongering, bigoted Birchers will be out on your asses.
So basically the party will be the same as it used to be.
So…what policies don’t apply to the poor and minorities? What conservative principles are harmful to the poor and minorities? Please…..enlighten us.
That is very scary. The “needs” of the larger voting blocks being what? More welfare? More free stuff that someone else pays for? Can you clarify this for the rest of us?
And the acronym RINO will disappear.
You lose.
“What does this mean for the United States?”
It means that our future will not be that of Greece, but of South Africa, wherein a First-World European-based society structured on the rule of law and advance by merit, is forced to accede power to Third-World masses with a sixth-grade education (at best), and with revenge in their minds for perceived misdeeds under the European-based system.
You say “but we’re not at all like South Africa; they had that nasty apartheid thing going.” Well, isn’t the Left busy painting the conservatives in the US as racists? Same result.
(And no, I’m not Victor.)
White South Africans didn’t fight back. I don’t think that will necessarily be the same here in the US. Secession has been brought to the fore by numbers never seen before since the first US civil war. Don’t expect white Americans to go down without a fight.
Well, I think you can look at that in different ways. If white females and white males move inexorably toward becoming the same kind of bloc vote as blacks are for Dimmocrats, then that could potentially be GOOD news for the GOP.
Remember that there are many states with 90% or better white populations. If whites in those states, men and women, average a 60% allegiance to the GOP in every presidential election,then the election is over before it starts. 60% of 90% is 54%, a majority. States that fit into this category include some of those New England bastions of liberalism, like Connecticut and New Hampshire. Iowa fits the bill. Even states like Pennsylvania are very white in terms of the composition of the state population. A majority of all the states have large white majorities, where no other racial/ethnic group is even close in numbers or percentages.
Frankly, though I am a conservative, I would hate for the party to win on the narrow basis of race. Mainly because our ideas are for the betterment of everyone and a stronger civil society for all, regardless of race, color or creed; also it would officially put a sell-by date on our party. Once some group or combination of several gained the full demographic upper-hand, we would be toast.
The secret to future success for the GOP is to broaden our appeal. Asians should naturally be receptive to our message. Latinos evince much more conservative ideas than the liberals they vote for. So do blacks for that matter, but as Star Parker regularly says, the Dems have put millions of blacks onto “a liberal plantation” and it would be next to impossible for the GOP to break that hold.
To echo some of Ann Coulter’s sentiments, we have to stop putting up idiots like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Just think about what a different Senate there would be at this moment if the TP no-goodniks hadn’t forced 3 dunces on us in 2010 and 2 more this time. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the chances lost in the last two cycles. We had 5 easily winnable seats in NV, CO, DE, IN and MO and lost them all. Several by landslides. Anybody running in Nevada, other than Angle, would have beaten Reid. Ken Buck wasn’t much better a choice in CO. Mike Castle was a certain bet to win in DE. The Democrats had a long hard belly laugh when we put up the “not witch.” Akin and Mourodck said things so singularly stupid and politically suicidal, that I began to wonder if either ever really wanted to win. The both got their clocks cleaned in states that BHO lost by landslide margins. As Ann says, there is no constituency for what Mourdock and Akin were selling. It might make them look big and bad to hard-right religious conservatives, but the broader electorate views them as extreme in their beliefs and voted accordingly. Both lost in states that lean GOP in one case, MO, and one, IN, that is traditionally Republican. To boot, Obama lost very large amounts of support in both states between 2008 and 2012. He narrowly lost MO in ’08 and narrowly won IN that same year. This time, both states voted for Romney by double-digit margins.
The Democrats spent big money to intervene in the GOP primaries to put Angle and Akin on the ballot. Primaries are the one place where money really matters, and the Dems have learned to do this well. The RNC needs to beable to jump in and spend big money whenever the Dems interfere in GOP primaries. We need to interfere in their primaries.
And banning abortion in all cases except life of the mother IS the mainstream Republican position. The candidates need to be able to discuss it intelligently as Reagan did, but that is hard when the Dem media delves into the issue in debates. This is what tripped up Mourdock.
Agree. What makes sense and is reasonable no longer holds. We have a propagandist media complicit with tyrants. How will those people who don’t read and research and study know who is to really blame for their suffering? They make easily believe that George Bush is still to blame when the weather is bad. And that it is those nasty racist Confederate Republicans who enjoy lynching Blacks who are to blame. They may just continue to believe anything the talking heads in the MSM blather on about.
I understand that behind the Iron Curtain of yesteryear the people stopped taking ‘the news’ they heard seriously. I wonder if our free cell phone & union Americans will ever wise up or if they will ever care about anything other than their next government check or high. As long as they have Republicans to hate and blame, why should they care?
I love what this country was but not what it seems to be today.
The time will come when the leftist tyrants go to gore the proverbial ox of the journalists; then we can expect them to really do their jobs.
“nothing short of complete collapse will cause them to think otherwise.”
Myxmaster, the “lights out” type of collapse in Atlas Shrugged or in the pages of mises.org won’t happen. Central banks can use printed money to replace real savings and use deficit spending and TARP to replace a public relucant to spend and business unwilling to invest (having no hope for a profit). Yes, this creates malinvestment and destroys capital, but it does move the needle some.
France has showed us the way. Something like 70% of their GDP is from gov’t (and rising). They’ll get by on 0.5 to 1% GDP growth per year. Venezuela showed us this can go on longer than anyone thought with no natural corrective.
The only thing that can re-invigorate middle class (yes bourgeois values) is a return to sound money (a commodity backed money). The central bank is the engine which permits the present corruption. Gov’t will never get courageuos enough to apply a corrective. That is why they created the central bank in the first place, to permit the statist expansion.
The lynchpin which permits all these evils to exist is the central bank. The only corrective is sound money.
The Cultural Upheaval of Loose Money –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KIDTGKX298
Well I’d love to believe that the GOP is going to make a great comeback over Obamacare, but color me cynical and extraordinarily pessimistic. If we could not win as important an election as this after 4 disastrous years with Obama there is, quite frankly, no way a few more disasters/economic meltdowns will turn the tide.
The GOP is incompetent, and the country sold on the delusion — drilled into their heads by co-opted media, the educational system, and the culture — that progressivism is the answer to everything, and those who are religious or principled conservatives are hateful ignorant racists. When Obamacare turns to a disaster (and it will), the left will turn their venom on conservatives, business, “the rich”, doctors, religious people, and anyone else who can be blamed — and the citizenry will nod in agreement, and vote for more of the same.
Where this all ends is anyone’s guess — economic & social collapse seems entirely within the realm of possibility, and there is no possibility of politics as salvation. We are headed for some very dark times, and anyone who puts their hope in politics — left or right — is a fool, sorry to say.
Remember, the fool builds his house on sand, the wise man on the Rock.
What you’ve written can’t be denied.
But … by 2014 … many people will already be enrolled in the “public option.” There will be many who, while once able to afford Health Insurance — will no longer be able to. And those who will have been newly enrolled in the public option (who never were able to afford Insurance before) … the Republicans will not dis-enroll in Insurance (and, at that point, it would be wrong to — just take it away from them). For sure that would cause riots and mayhem.
Rolling Obamacare back will be a monumental problem no matter how much people hate it. It’s very hard to say what will happen.
Are you living in an alternate reality? There is no public option in the bill – Obama (you know, that supposed socialist commie pinko) caved to the insurance companies on the public option without so much as token resistance.
The health care system of the United States is dysfunctional due to government interference distorting pricing to the point that the true cost of medical care is almost impossible to determine accurately.
100% user pays health care IS the ONLY answer and we will arrive there via total economic collapse forcing the issue.
Great point. Reality is the best teacher of truth. The GOP has failed to live by the truth. A Wiemar Republic kind of end is coming, perhaps a dictator like Hitler will arise. The problem is that there is no America to save the day. This is not 1941.
I wonder if this is a sort of punishment for the sin of slavery.
Wrong century. Our guilt for slavery was paid in the blood and treasure expended in the Civil War. This judgment is for abortion and contraception.
That is a large part but not the whole picture; one must add in there the expense of the truly fancy technology that is employed not only for complicated procedures & treatment regimens but just routine preventative maintenance care. Normal market forces don’t come into play because people expect most, if not all of it to be “free.” Under the circumstances of normal market forces, people would not opt for much of what they get for “free” or heavily subsidized through gov’t programs or private insurance. A few of many examples: Extremely expensive chemo therapy regimens for terminal cancer that only prolongs a life of suffering with no hope of a cure, coronary bypass surgery on people who have a long list of other chronic ailments from which they die not at all long from the time of the procedure, expensive life-support for people dying from ailments even modern medicine cannot turn the clock back upon.
Radical change is coming. Taxes will be raised, spending will be cut — yes, even for the “untouchable” big 3 entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — and inflation will skyrocket.
The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated using the Congressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion.
You moronic sheeple can’t even begin to imagine what is coming.
All of you who put your hope in politics are fools.
In 2010 we in the tea parties helped elect a modern record number of Republicans. The GOP establishment immediately went to war against us. The disdain for the tea parties shown by the likes of John Sununu and Karl Rove was evident to all. In 2011 the GOP establishment told us that we had to abort conservative principles to fully fund the government and Planned Parenthood and NPR and that later Republicans would take over congress and the White House and all would be good. In 2012, the GOP bent old rules and made new rules in order to stuff Romney down our throats in the primaries. They told us that he was inevitable and that he would win the moderates and that us tea party types were purists and worse for opposing him. When Mr. Inevitable lost, as many of us predicted last spring, it was the tea parties’ fault. Now we hear that the GOP needs to adopt progressive programs like amnesty and to raise taxes so that we can win over moderates in 2014 and 2016.
With friends like the GOP establishment, who needs enemies? Let it burn!
Amen.
Spot on!
I hope the Republicans just say no to any increase in the debt limit. Why are they (we) so stupid and go along with the rhetoric and false dilemmas of the dhimmicrats? There is no “fiscal cliff”, just like there was no “nuclear option”, just like there was no “war on women”, etc…
They are going to kick the proverbial can down the road until they can no longer do so. The great American experiment has played out pretty well, considering. Like everything else in life, it must come to an end. I just hope the good lord takes me before it happens.
Let me be perfectly clear (unlike the President): safe loses and cowards are always loathed. If you want to win, you have to be courageous, stand for something worth fighting for, and never compromise it no matter the cost.
The GOP will not regain the majority with “leaders” like Boehner, McConell, Cantor and Karl Rove who is pushing Jeb Bush. All of these cocktail party guys put their efforts into destroying conservative and not the Left. The GOP will only regain power if they turn the reigns over to new voices, Scott Walker, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and others who are true conservatives. I’m still bummed Mia Love lost but look for her to make another run. If we can get McCain and Graham off the TV circuit and get some fresh voices in front of viewers, maybe we can turn the corner but for now all I see is that the establishment power grab continues.
Yes, all the GOP – the party which was just roundly defeated for being too extreme, and that during an election cycle in which they had nearly every conceivable advantage (fundraising, mediocre economy, relatively unpopular incumbent, and so on) – has to do is move even further to the extreme right. Great plan.
Ah, I see you have your talking points down, anyone other than the establishment GOP is extreme right. The last conservative nominated by the GOP was Reagan.
Team Bush = progressives, not conservatives, they are globalists. “New World Order” ring a bell
Dole
McCain
Romney
Those who want to cut spending and move towards a balanced budget are deemed extreme? Guess what, the financial collapse to come will impact everyone, it will not be party neutral, keep on with the Leftist talking points and you too can get a job on MSNBC. McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, McCain, Graham, etc have sent the GOP to the way of the Whigs.
I’ll take Scott Walker anyday over those clowns. They want the power but they don’t want to do what is right for the country. Pelosi, Reid, Schumer = extremists but the weak GOP will never say that, Truman, JFK would no longer be welcomed in their old party which is now the party of Moore, Code Pink, Soros, etc.
OK, so you don’t believe me, nor the GOP’s own analysts, nor the exit polls. That’s fine – continue to become more extreme, and continue to narrow your appeal to a fast-shrinking portion of the electorate. If current demographic trends continue – and there’s no reason to think they won’t – North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Iowa, and the entire upper Midwest (except maybe Indiana) will all be solidly blue states by 2020. Texas, Missouri, North Dakota, Montana, and Arizona will be swing states. Since the GOP long ago conceded the densely-populated coasts, you’ll be left only with the sparsely-populated Tornado Alley, the Bible Belt in the deep south, and a few states in the intermountain west – giving the GOP only 115 solid electoral votes, versus 318 solid for the Democrats.
So, by all means, keep pandering to the most extreme right-wing elements in the country. Keep touting your reactionary positions on social issues, and running senile white men who use phrases like “legitimate rape.” Keep trying to dismantle wildly popular and extremely successful programs like Medicare, as the Paul Ryan budget attempted to do. We’ll see how that works out for you in the future.
Actually, for the sake of the country, I hope the GOP comes to its senses, purges the Tea Party extremists, and broadens their appeal. It would not be good, either for the nation or for the Democrats themselves in the long run, to have one party become hegemonic. But as it stands, that’s certainly where we’re headed.
Sorry, Rick. I’ve been hearing, “How *blah, blah blah,* will make the GOP the majority party!” for over thirty years now. With every election, it’s something else that’ll do the trick. All we have to do is…
Hasn’t happened the way any of the experts or pundits said it would. It never happens the way they say it will.
…of course, the last time Republicans pulled it off, they acted like Democrats. Worse, really. New taxes, bigger government, more laws, less freedom and liberty, record setting deficit spending… Since then, the Democrats took the last Republican majority record and used it as guide for how to *really* destroy the country.
You need to come up with a new schtick, conservative and Republican pundits, voters and politicians. This one’s all used up…
The Tea Party is dying off.
2010 was the last hurrah for White America.
There will never be another white, conservative, capitalist as president ever again.
You are outnumbered. We are the future. We are over 50 million, and by 2050 we will be 130 million. Your days are numbered.
Yeah right. Dream on. Remember, la vida es sueno.
OK, what type of future do you envision exactly? Chronic unemployment? Permanent underclass? Out of control crime? Balkanization and ghetto-ization of America? Please advise, we would like to know.
Funny how all those Republicans in the past whose policies you now paint as Gulag incarnate were white Christian capitalists.
Something funny has been going on the last few years that brought web sites like this into existence and made everyone in congress afraid of being primaried.
I pray it does die.
We should have annexed Latin America as an imperial holiding long ago.
It’s still not too late to take on Mexico & make it our 51st state. I don’t know why this approach is not on the table. Their drug cartels could be readily defeated; the amnesty problem would be largely solved because our level of corruption is basically nothing compared to that which runs things now down there south of the border.
Not a state, but an imperial territory, like the Phillipines, used to be.
At minimum, Mexico and Cuba should have been annexed long ago. Really all the way down to Colombia. And retained control of the Panama canal, which now the Chinese do.
And won’t that be fun? We can live in grass shacks, wear shabby clothes, and ride around in 40 year-old cars, just like they do in Cuba. Ah, Utopia!
In the wake of the inevitable apocalypse that is going to happen (it’s just a matter of time), we all will be really lucky to be doing that.
W@La Raza: People can vote with their feet, you know. Who do you think is going to employ the illegal aliens you promote? Who is going to pay the taxes for all the social benefits y ou are plundering?
Why vote with your feet when you can vote with your arms.
The rest of the title of this column should read “…..and how the clown Boehner will squander the opportunity to fix things.” Repubs in the majority? Pfft. So what? As they say, “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference….”
The premise of this article assumes the GOP will be smart enough and politically savvy enough to take advantage of the ongoing disaster that Obamacare will become. The same GOP that nominated the “father of Obamacare” to run for president in 2012. I wouldn’t bet a large sum of money (say, anything north of 3 cents) on that happening.
You are delusional if anybody thinks that the Repubs will make political hay out of the impending cataclysm that is Ocare.
The Dems will spin the business closures, the surging un- and under employment, the unavailability of physicians and medical services, and all the rest of the horrorshow of unintended consequences that is ObamaCare, as just another example of the “greed” of the 1%ers. The Dem lapdogs in the media will spin the bad news to put the Repubs in the worst possible light. The Obamabots will howl for their “free” health insurance, riots ensue when the wait to see a doctor is 6 months and no providers are available outside of a major city.
You see, the end game of Obama are is the destruction of the the private healthcare insurance industry, where 85% of Americans obtain insurance, usually as a result of their employment. As unemployment rises, fewer and fewer people are in the private insurance pool. This causes premiums to go up and reimbursements to providers to drop – this is occurring right now. As Obamacare rolls out, either people are not employed at all or are reduced to part time or the employer just prefers to pay the fine for the next several years. These factors will cause a cascading failure among the private insurers, many of whom will no longer offer health insurance as 85% of the population currently enjoys it.
Americans will be forced onto the state exchanges, which will reimburse the providers at the level of Medicaid, which very physicians accept at this time. The providers will also be looking at a drop in Medicare reimbursements (due to the 800 billion raided for Obama are. Without their revenues bouyed by the reimbursements from private plans, which will be gone, many physicians and hospitals will either close or become like giant charity hospitals.
This is, of course, if Obamacare doesn’precipitate a full on economic collapse of the US economy, which is what I believe will happen.
All the signs are there that this country is in for some terrible times in the next several years. Better brace for impact. It won’t matter a whit who is in charge, Repub or Dem. There is simply no recovery from this point on.
The end game of Obama is the destuction of the United States.So far he has done a good job!
Having lived in the course of 50 plus years through the implementation & monopolization of health care in the United Kingdom and Canada, I believe that this article betrays a sense of misplaced optimism.
There is no evidence to suggest that suggestions from conservative political parties for the tweaking of a national health care system in any way encourage the electorate to vote for them.
Quite the contrary. Those parties are easily demonized by the leftist opposition.
Now living through the same process as an American citizen, I see no cause for this author’s conclusions. Perhaps my misplaced confidence (as evidenced by the last election) in the independence of the American electorate will be finally rewarded. I doubt it though. The demographics of the next 20 years–baby boomers who spent everything they earned getting old and ill–speaks in favor of the contrary prediction.
Excellent,this is also what happened in Australia.
This seems so obvious. Once complaints pile up, Obama and the Senate and a sizable number in the house will set out to “fix” the problems. Of course the solution will mean even more governmental control. The current plan is only one step toward complete governmental control of healthcare. The more the people complain, the quicker they can move on to the next step. The media will assist. Those Republicans that protest will be portrayed as heartless.
There is no surer way to control a population than to control healthcare. That gives the government control over every aspect of a person’s life from what they eat and drink to which children are permitted to be born to when the time has come to leave this life.
I do not believe for one second that Obamacare was ever meant to be more than a temporary step toward complete governmental control.
Bingo, and there were plenty of us who pointed out it is the way to single payer, OCare is supposed to fail, all the Leftists wanted was the nose under the tent. The Left plays the long game, this battle has been going on for over 100 years. Take your pain pill granny that’s all you get.
“OCare is supposed to fail,”
Classic Cloward-Piven: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
Any grass roots conservative is familiar with Cloward – Piven but ask the GOP establishment and they will say O is a nice guy just in over his head. The reality is it is all going to plan, watch for more regulations and Executive Orders. Congress is no longer relevan and they are spineless. Pravda will continue to give their guy air cover and vilify the right.
Progressivism, communism, socialism fail wherever they’ve been tried. But the Alfred E. Neumanns currently running the US government aren’t a bit worried. Their true inspiration comes from Europe. But they fail to internalize that its socialism was built on the belief that the US would never allow it to fall into the hands of the hyper-progressives of the USSR. But the Alfred Es—geniuses all—will gut US defense anyway in the belief that the Euros somehow got it wrong and they, the true believers, know better. The real joke in all of this is that the Bamster really seeks to harm the US and take us down a peg or two in the name of world fairness—maybe he’ll get another Nobel for trying.
We’ll survive Obama’s depredations against the US economy. By are Republicans in Congress still not aware that all they will never get from O is the phony bonhomie of a good ole boy pat on the back?
So, the Republicans signed a consent decree. If hte Rpublicans seriously wanted to fight voter fraud, it’s easy enough to do. Fund Libertarian Party, Conservative Party, and Constitution Party voter fraud detection efforts. Consent decree doesn’t apply to them…
And for all the true libertarians out there, fighting voter fraud sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?
All of the small companies I worked for (as a software engineer), from a dozen employees on up provided high quality health insurance. I don’t know what would happen to them under the affordable care act, but I’m pretty sure that their premiums wouldn’t go up.
You know, not all companies are trying to stiff their employees.
What makes you think that companies are trying to stiff their employees when they find that their expenses exceed their ability to pay, so they have to trim somewhere or go out of business? Have you ever had to meet a payroll?
And what makes you “pretty sure that their premiums wouldn’t go up” when they’ve been going up everywhere else? Obamacare is designed to undermine the private insurance market and push everyone into a government-controlled system. The Dems weren’t very concerned about what was actually in the bill, as long as it gave them control over the citizens’ health care.
Come to think of it I worked for a company with 6 employees that had health insurance.
Obamacare is designed to undermine the private insurance market and push everyone into a government-controlled system. The Dems weren’t very concerned about what was actually in the bill, as long as it gave them control over the citizens’ health care.
I don’t believe that’s right. What Democrats wanted was universal coverage, and AFAIK they used the most conservative model possible that was still capable of getting to that goal.
Point out to me here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#Overview
exactly where are they pushing people into a government controlled system
take your time.
I’ll be happy to explain it to you.
You liberals wanted universal coverage *no matter how much it cost*.
Cost containment was not even a secondary consideration in ObamaCare. It was treated as an afterthought.
When you create a program as a moral imperative without a moment’s consideration to future cost, you’ll get a program whose costs will skyrocket.
And then, you liberals will say “See? We tried to work through private insurers, but these greedy monsters keep raising premiums on working families. We need a single-payer system!”
See, I actually read Daily KOS, Moveon.org, etc. I know what’s coming down the pike.
Am I getting warm on any of these?
So your proof that ObamaCare pushes everyone into a government controlled system is based on imagining a future where liberal Democrats have total control of the government and REPLACE ObamaCare with a government controlled system?
WTF?
So in other words ObamaCare does none of that. Thanks for playing.
Right, if you worked for them then the laws of economics couldn’t possibly apply. I imagine that your briefest employment guarantees perpetual profitability too . Your juvenile conjectures are as sweetest gold to us, please favor our unworthy ears with many more.
How many of you work for companies who deny their employee’s health care?
Lets see some reality here instead of abstract crap.
Boy, you don’t sound very well informed for a “scholar.” You’ve also had a pretty cushy life if you think every job comes with a gold-plated health plan unless the employer is just too stingy to provide it.
You’re not following the news if you haven’t heard about all the companies that are scaling back, or putting expansion plans on hold, or cutting employees’ hours so they can stay afloat under the reckless, ill-considered mandates that the Demsheviks have placed on them. (Oh, that’s right — the Demmedia don’t want to report on such things.)
Demsheviks are very keen to demand that other people provide things to certain other people, and very unconcerned about where the funds will come from.
That’s the Dems way. Their definition of public policy is “let’s you and him share.” Take a look at Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man. Among the points made is that that formula has been Dems policy since the post Civil War era. Like GB Shaw once remarked, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
Obama Care includes a 2% tax on medical devices either made or sold in the US, so a few companies are complaining and/or pulling up so that they can make devices abroad to be sold abroad and avoid the tax.
Why do I mention this? Because one guy I know took Rick Moran’s list of complaining medical device companies and tried to claim that these were companies in trouble because the cost of their employee health plan was going up.
It was a simple lie and easily deflated by doing a news search. The investment press knew exactly what was going on.. but these companies DID want people to be against Obama Care which after all is costing them a 2% tax so some of them put out deliberately confusing press releases complaining about it and hoping to create exactly the reaction my acquaintance had.
So far “all the companies that are scaling back” are the medical device companies I mentioned (and which Rick did a column on) or are fast food companies considering cutting back hours on their work force to avoid paying health insurance for them.
I don’t see how that costs employers anything, but their employees may be unhappy to have to take two jobs, if they haven’t already.
Actually the cost to employers will be from customers who would have preferred that they treat their employees better and raised prices instead. Some people would feel better about a hamburger meal that costs 50 cents more and knowing that the employees has health insurance. It’s a similar attitude to not wanting your hamburger packed in styrofoam. And people don’t count pennies when they shop for fast food, if you’re poor enough to count pennies, you make your own lunch.
“Some people would feel better about a hamburger meal that costs 50 cents more and knowing that the employees has health insurance. It’s a similar attitude to not wanting your hamburger packed in styrofoam.”
Only liberals think that way.
So yes, burger restaurants in San Francisco or Boston might find affluent liberal customers happy that they treat their customers better.
But notice what enormous sales Wal-Mart continues to rack up, year after year. That’s because their customers are largely poor and lower working class, and have to find the best bargains. The recent labor troubles at Wal-Mart didn’t change that.
That’s because people who think like you, don’t shop at Wal-Mart anyway.
Behold the problem. Joshua, whose scholarly opinion is that all of these PJM opinions are “crap”, voted for more spending, for higher taxes, for more regulations, for socialization of anything and everything that the government can get its hands on.
But now comes the real problem. Government is just bad at almost everything it does and spends 10 times more than necessary to do it. It is wasteful, unfair, riddled with fraud, always caters to special interests and, in general, saps energy and productivity from the society it rules.
So forget the supposed benefits of Obamacare, Cap and Trade, taxing the rich, unionization, low Fed funds rates, etc. What can be said without ambiguity is that our collective standard of living can only be as high as our collective productivity combined with how well we utilize our natural resources. Does anyone think it is going to go up under any of those Progressive programs? It might be spread more evenly over the population since what you put in the big pot is no longer pegged to what you get out of the big pot. But the average is going down. Way down.
I am sorry to say that I believe as a lot of commentors do that the tipping point has been reached and there is no short term solution. The only thing you can do is to understand the new rules and aggressively position yourself and your loved ones to play the game accordingly. One day people like Joshua – or his heirs – will not be able to deny the damage the new order has caused. When we are all unionized, when corporations are taxed and regulated or nationalized to the hilt, no one but the political elite will be wealthy. There may be lots of people with lots of “money” – but it will not buy enough nor will there be enough to provide anything but a meager and miserable existence for the masses.
I only hire contractors. That way we don’t have to pay any of the entitlement withholdings, unemployment contributions or offer any benefits. We pay more than we would for full-time employees but we get responsible adult employees, not economically clueless children. They tend to be better people than those who want to be employees too . Moreover when bad times come and we have to downsize we can do so easily. Contractors are the future (to the extent that there is one) .
The central flaw in your thesis that Obamacare will make the GOP a majority party is the existence of the current GOP leadership. A bigger collection of clowns and dimwits is hard to imagine in a single political party. They never cease to amaze with their ineptness, their inability to take the fight to the Democrats, and their blithering idiocy in fashioning primary rules to defeat their own candidates, whom they refuse to take a role in grooming and promoting. They let any nitwit (cf Sanctorum, Perry, McCotter, Bachmann, Paul, and Gingrich) who wants to run do so. They behave as if they had no dog in any political fight. They don’t bother to pick a couple of guys who can appeal to the independent voters. They don’t bother to cultivate minorities consciously – rather they “discover” minority candidates and let fortune decide.
I dispair that the Republican party is the only vessel available to conservatives when the craft is so useless.
Quit Dreaming!
By October of 2014 Obamacare’s mess will be the fault of the GOP and Boehner and company will be apologizing for their misdeeds.
The MSM has had a taste of what they can do when they don’t even try to look unbiased and they will be full steam ahead propogandizing from this day forward.
It’s always fun, this time of year, for conservatives to dream the GOP will somehow overcome the media machine and presume most Americans that voted for Obama will change. Watching these three – Obama(Dems), the GOP, Majority of American voters is like watching the wizard of Oz clip of the Strawman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nauLgZISozs
Sadly, thunkin’ ’bout things that ain’t ever gonna happen should be done with your favorite alcoholic holiday drink. Watch the hangover, though, I understand 2016 is gonna happen and we’ll be runnin’ that Compassionate Moderate W III.
“the Republicans, if they play it right”
And there’s the problem.
“The GOP will be blameless in this fiasco.” that’s wishful thinking. All of the negatives will be blamed on the right and all of the positives (as fleeting as they are) will be gifts from the left.
I don’t think the GOP has a spine. If I were there [in congress] during this, they’d have carted me off to the re-education camp for my outrages in attempting to destroy this monstrosity from moving forward.
And, fundamentally, the GOP accepts the same basic morality, “we need some sort of safety net.” It’s really just a matter of degree and consistency that differentiates the parties.
After the Labor party of Gr Britain won the election of 1945 and created the welfare state, there was a massive reaction and the Conservatives were voted back in office at the next election. Trouble was, they were voted in just to run the welfare state better than the crazies in Labor. So if Obamacare is the cultural change in society both it’s supporters and opponents say it is, what is the point of acquiring power? I really have no use for being the movement that runs Obamacare better.
Rick, you have missed the ball here. You clearly do not grasp the magnitude of deflection going on from the left. They have dismantled the Constitution piece by piece, and are destroying our economy. Do you think for a second they are allowing one iota of blame to fall on their heads? REALLY??? They have mastered the art of lying to such a degree that Bush, (and the GOP generally) are to blame for all things bad and unpleasant, while all things good are resultant from their own policies!! Don’t you see that? Do you think for an instant that they will stand by as the curtain is pulled back on this monstrosity we call Obamacare? they already know what they will say when the perennial *^*()_ hits the fan. No, you missed it on this one. As long as the drones have their Obamafones and food stamps, it will be the GOP’s fault when the doctors quit and people start dying. Mark my words.
I don’t buy it. We have become a nation of imbeciles. We’ve sold our birthright for a pot of porridge.
I am bitterly disappointed with the direction of this country and am absolutely sure it so far from its original intent, the only way to correct its path is through a failure so spectacular, that the complicit and corrupted media can no longer hide the consequences of these political decisions based on the most insidious of lies.
Let it happen – the quicker, the better. Let every large American urban area look like Detroit. Let these racist bloc voters, our corrupt media, the idiot I-phone college crowd, these abortion loving, man hating feminists, the Hollywood jet set, the Marxist academicians feel the consequences of their deceit. There will be no where to run when America fails, because the rest of the world will soon follow.
God willing, I will be there to remind them of the lies, the consequences of their abject stupidity, and help turn the mob against the deceivers.
Only when we are absolutely broken, perhaps we can pick up the pieces and make it whole again. Perhaps the majority will wise up, but it more likely they’ll need to die off for America to stand a chance of returning to a position of virtue and true leadership.
If not, this nation deserves to fade away into the dustbin of human history.
I’ve said before: You can’t beat something with nothing.
Romney, the GOP, the entire conservative movement never offered a real alternative to ObamaCare that had real numbers, scored by the CBO, and a real analysis of how it would help Americans who are temporarily down on their luck. All they ever had were a few bullet points on a few viewgraphs–nothing resembling a real plan. So they would criticize ObamaCare for costing too much–while saying nothing about how much their own plan would cost and whether it could cover as many Americans as ObamaCare could.
You can’t beat something with nothing. The line “ObamaCare is socialism!” fell on deaf ears. A detailed alternative plan would have worked better.
The problem with an “alternative” would be that its STILL gov’t care. Its not the job of the federal government to be involved in healthcare.
It will be a constant game of cat and mouse between the govt and business. Govt will see businesses not hiring a 50th person or paying the tax instead of offering healthcare and the govt will simply change the levels that trigger the requirements and raise the penalties higher. Then businesses will spend time and effort (which takes away form innovation, etc) finding new ways to circumvent the newly imposed limits. Wash, rinse, repeat…ad infinitum.
You see, once you have the insidious law passed, you can tinker with the details forever. Of course, that creates more uncertainty about how a business owner (investor) can accurately plan for the future and it raises the cost (lowers the profit) of doing business so you have less overall growth and wealth creation because you have more money going to unproductive causes. What a total disaster for the nation.
“I told you so”, is code for racism – that’s how the Left will win, backstopped by their Operatives-with-Bylines!
ObamaCare is now here to stay. That battle is over.
But the GOP can still propose to reform it. For example, that inflexible rule that establishes the standard for small business as “50 or more employees” is going to produce lots of finagling (49 employees). That could be fixed by making the requirement based not on the number of employees but on the total amount of money spent on employees’ wages and benefits. (That way, a business could comply with ObamaCare but it might have to pay for it by eschewing generous wage raises.)
In the 1990s, Gingrich reformed welfare. He didn’t end Government aid to the poor; he changed the incentives in the system.
The GOP can do the same thing again. The GOP can at least show that it can run a national health care plan efficiently and build the right incentives into the system. That’s how the Tories have won elections in Britain, despite NHS.
That’s right sinz.
It’s called small ball conservatism. Rearranging the deck chairs in a conservative manner on the USS Titanic. Campaigning for election based on your proclaimed ability to be better managers of the gigantic Welfare State. This is what European conservative parties have become. And quite frankly that is what Romney/Ryan were running on with regards to Medicare and Entitlements. Not there ending but merely better management of them, so that they may continue. Given the choice, the electorate voted for more Welfare State that Romney/Ryan were defending.
The ideological battle is over. Are we on the road to serfdom, or are we already there?
That battle is NOT over yet, because the lawsuits are still coming.
“The GOP will be blameless in this fiasco.” But they — And the “greedy” insurance companies they work for– *will* be blamed by the media. and the 47% will believe them. Obamacare was designed to fail, with the cure for its failure, according to the media, being a single-payer, national health system. I see it playing out like the housing crash/ credit crunch of ’08: stupid Dem policies drive us to the edge of ruin, but Republicans and the private sector get the blame, with the result being more govt. control.
It’s a hell of a note to be in the same position as our politicians:
I’m reduced to hoping I’m old enough(63) to enjoy the remainder of my days before the inevitable complete societal and financial collapse that is coming when the FED and the govt can no longer walk the montary tightrope they currently teeter upon.
I retired at 60 as soon as it became evident that Obama would be elected. The endgame was obvious and it was time to go Galt. It’s been great, I just hope it lasts another 30 years or so.
If you think it can’t…look at Europe. It will be ugly for most, but I have prepared as well as I can, right down to a house and land far from any city that can be self-sufficicent.
Almost everyone not already financially independent is in trouble, big trouble. Those of us who are will be fighting to keep what we have, and they will steal about half of that over the next 10 years to keep things afloat.
I laughed when I read the following.
1. The warnings will long since have been forgotten by the public, with the aid of the main-stream media who will bury anything related to the republican’s warning and being railroaded by a majority democrat house & senate. (think fast & furious and Benghazi gate, think footage of 9/11) The story will be re-framed so that the republicans will somehow be responsible. Doubt that? They still have many convinced that it was all Bush’s fault.
2. The GOP will not remain blameless. The present negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff, will as our ‘Speaker of the House’ has indicated, include Obamacare. They will be lured into becoming involved enough that they can share some of the blame for the mess and that will be enough for a scorched earth media campaign against them.
3. The 2010 election went well and 2012 was the republican’s election for the taking. They managed to not only lose the presidential election, but they also managed to lose senate seats in the bargain by nominating morons. Do not underestimate the stupidity and craven cowardice of the country club establishment republicans who control the party. Though I thought Romney the best of the candidates running and a basically decent and good man, he was a middle of the road technocrat who as governor instituted a program similar to Obamacare in Massachusetts. There is no getting around that. He was a middle of the road big government technocrat.
4. We need reform. Serious and radical reform. The establishment politicians of both parties are too vested in the existing system. They will not rock the boat, and if they see the boat is sinking, their priority will be going down first class. I see no one in any party that’s even remotely electable, who is offering serious solutions.
5. The republicans will be marginalized from this point forward. They lack the “vision thing”, they lack the will and tenacity to fight and fight to win. As much as I hate to say it, give the democrats their due. They fought the better fight and won against the odds, but only because the republicans failed so miserably. At this point a new party is needed.
You expect a nation that re-elected Barack Obama to comprehend that Obamacare is going to cost jobs? No, the blame for lost jobs will be on the (largely Republican) business owners themselves.
Americans obviously are incapable of thinking the extra step, and the GOP assumes so at its peril.
A colonial commie super genius is not a constitutional republican or a competent socialist. President Wile Coyote is an orwellian nightmare who is not smart enough to take credit for what he will accidently straight out.
The 50 employee rule will do a number on his large donors and friends in big cities. One less than 50 employee company dopes his employee on the totally screwed up exchange, his competitors will be forced to do so. The knucklehead is going to create free health care market by default and everyone will be on their own. The question is how is that unknown free market going to operate?
The first step is creating a wide variety of plans and limiting federal government involved. The next step is creating a health care with a NB&A twist leagues (a transferrable construction industry solution – Ideal Project Delivery System, Pretzel Project Delivery System, or Design Build with a NB&A twist).
In 1776, Adam Smith wrote the wealth of United States and our founding fathers recreate government size limiting Elizabethan public corporations. There is a game called Ultimatum. Fredrick Von Hayek introduced himself to Sir John Keynes by asking about Edgeworth. Edgeworth did all the “companies play free market basketball on diving boards” invisible hand check math that most everyone can understand or feel. Adam Smith and our founding fathers were moralists.
The major flaw with this article is that it pre-supposes an informed, educated electorate that is capable of logical, rational reasoning and impervious to demogogic and emotional appeals. In other words, it is pure fantasy. The ‘education’ system of the USA has been purged of any objective standards of knowledge. Together with the media, academia (starting from kindergarten) has made the left positions the default ones in the culture at large. Taken together with the infantilization of the larger portion of American society, I would say that far from making the Republicans the party of the future,the implementation of ObamaCare could possibly make BHO President for Life. Roosevelt’s disasterous policies prolonged the Great Depression in the USA, and he was rewarded with election to 4 terms, finally leaving the White House in a hearse. If Obama gets to apponit another 2-3 Justices to the Supreme Court in the next couple of years, I don’t think he will have to worry about the 22nd Amendment. Or he may just feel strong enough to do a Morsi and bypass the courts altogehter.
Terry Turner is correct. As a health insurance agent watching in horror as the implementation of ObamaCare began in 2010, with more provisions in 2011, and more in 2012, etc, etc, it is very clear that the true end game is government run health care. ObamaCare has methodically been forcing the insurance carriers and employers to jump through more and more hoops. Yes, it will be disastrous as it will result in higher and higher premiums and gridlock regulations that no one can interpret. And all those Amerikans who voted for Obama (aka Santa Claus) will be SCREAMING for the government to take over our “broken” system.
This is called “stabbing you in the back then turning you in for carrying a concealed weapon.”
Yeah, you mean that internationalist, Wall Street captured, never saw a mandate they didn’t like, republican party that shares after hours hot tubs, Mexican gardeners, the maids, with their transnational democratic party counter parts? Curious how they all seem to like the same Generals, enjoy spending other people’s money, and basically attend the same schools and sleep in the same beds. That party?
So what prevents businesses from offering a two-tier wage structure? I.e. if the business end of a health care plan was $6000, having a hiring discussion like this:
“Well, Bob. We can hire you for $30,000 a year without health insurance, or $24,000 a year with the business paying part of your health insurance plan. At any time during your employment, you can switch tiers.”
As the voters of California have proven, so long as the GOP is seen as obsessed by abortion and private sexual conduct and being sockpuppets of the religious right the voters will vote for nearly anyone else. The Democrats have driven Calofornia to bankruptcy and beyond and the voters rewarded them with two-thirds super-majorities in the legislature and all the statewide offices.
You cannot be the party of small government as long as you are seen as the bedroom police.
It was the democrats and big media who made vaginas and big bird election issues. Anything to keep from discussing the economy. Having worked once I would expect these to be the issues next election as well. I dont expect it to work because the next election is not a national election. Big Media doesn’t do state or local elections well. I expect the tea party to do well again.
Can you hear the drums of war?
The smoke signals are evident everywhere.
The enemies of liberty and freedom reside in DC and State Capitols.
Those that created and exempted themselves and their friends from the Laws deserve no quarter.
You are not defenseless against this tyrany.
It’s comming….prepare yourselves.
PS
Forget the GOP.
Join the Constitution Party.
Register D for your Primary and vote for the dumbest, weakest D candidate.
Then vote Constitution Party in the general.
Chicago Marxist tactics.
As someone said during the debates about Hillarycare in the early 1990s, “If this thing passes, they’ll be hunting Democrats with dogs by the year 2000.” Update that to 2020 and you’ve got the picture. The American people might be gulled into voting for guns and butter and pie for breakfast, but when the consequences come home, they’ll demand something different. Look at how many people nodded sensibly when the President said that under his policies energy costs would necessarily skyrocket, and then complained bitterly when gas prices headed toward $5 per gallon.
“The GOP will be blameless in this fiasco.”
That’s a hoot. OF COURSE the Republicans will get the blame. For everything. And a majority of the electorate will buy it, too.
Far from becoming a “majority party,” I fully expect the Republicans to lose the House of Representatives in 2014, because of how the donks and their media will blame everything that goes wrong during the next two years as the direct result of GOP “obstructionism.” And the Honey Boo-Boo voters out there will believe it.
The parasites now outnumber the hosts — and the parasites get to vote on the fate of the hosts. See y’ll at the bottom of the waterfall, because as a nation we’re all bound to go over it now.
“Elections have consequences!” — Barbara Boxer
“The parasites now outnumber the hosts — and the parasites get to vote on the fate of the hosts.”
The popular notion among reactionaries that the majority of the American people are parasites – your own words – is precisely why your party just lost an election you should have won handily.
To reinforce what Taylor Lake posted — the uninformed voters are more likely to blame republicans than democrats, especially after a media barrage like we just saw in the last election. Just because the democrats broke it, celebrated the damage and took full credit for the program doesn’t mean the public will understand and then turn to the republicans for change. Too many voters don’t know what’s going on or are subject emotional appeals that defy reality.
Instead of blaming the media, perhaps the party should look within itself. Get your hands from between females legs, stop worrying about what people do in their homes, have sympathy for those less fortunate, stop letting religious whackos dictate a portion of your party’s platform, expand your inclusiveness outside of white collar males and blue collar uneducated southerners and midwesterners, look forward – not backward…
You are a dupe. All the issues you raised are campaign issues brought up by democrats so that they could avoid discussing the economy. None are part of the republican platform, none were advocated by republican candidates. If you think 50% unemployment for black youth is some form of compassion then I can see how you came by your delusions.
Civil war is coming.
Hey Josh…..better get ready to run.
Because you and your fascist pig buddies are all going to die.
Destroying free enterprise is a feature, not a bug.
Sounds simple to me. Suppose I am a small businessman and have multiple locations. I got a corporation that owns corporations. Each corporation has less than 50 employees. When a corporation gets close to 50 employees, it’s time for a new corporation. A new corporation doesn’t cost very much, a couple of thou a year. If I have plants that have more than 50 employees, I am no longer a small businessman. The 50 employee figure divides small business from the big business.
goodness… imagine an employer actually taking care of his employees instead of running them into the ground with low wages and no insurance?
I can tell that you have run many businesses and are a phenomenally successful entrepreneur . Consequently I feel sure you can answer a difficult problem my partners and I are having. If a business sells a product for more than the cost of the raw materials, labor and capital equipment required to produce the product that is really profiteering is it not ? And Profiteering is a way of exploiting the consumer and should be stopped isn’t that so too ?
Republicans are always blamed. They’ll be blamed for this too.
As inflation proceeds, paying the penalty will look even better.
As inventive as business owners are (and I am one), ACA is the law: Efforts to evade it will ultimately fail. The country signaled a permanent change in direction when Obama was given a second turn. I have no doubt the economy will not recover, but Obama doesn’t care – he only has 4 more years to complete his imposition of his agenda. The ACA is just the starting point, and was passed with a compliant Congress. What concerns me is what he is planning that DOESN’T require a vote of Congress.
I don’t agree with this article’s conclusion. We would have won this past election if this were true. The only way the GOP could capitalize on this is with good populist messaging. The “it kills jobs” message is not working. Mind you I 100% agree that it kills jobs, but the message is not working. The message is going to need to be tailored to our increasingly impovershed population. The intellectual arguements and facts are on the GOP’s side, but that doesn’t mean people will vote for you.
We must kill the sacrifice.
To see whats in the sacrifice!
The Republicans will not win, but the Dems will not either; their plans will fail not through politics as usual but against the rocks of “Irish Democracy” (or for the more literary minded: as millions of Americans “go Galt”).
Given the election was won with a mere 1% plurality, politics as usual isn’t going to happen anymore, anyway. Read Walter Russel Mead’s “The American Interest” blog as he demonstrates how the “Blue model” is failing, we can see how the Progressive project is unwinding. The only thing that no one has figured out yet is the nature and shape of “post progressive” society.
The TEA Party movement is perhaps an outline of how it could happen, and I would advise that the TEA Partiers reading this go all out at the local level. If the civic and State governments are under the control of the TEA party movement then cutting back government and regulation can take place at the local level will be possible. This is the breeding ground and incubator for political careers as well, so future generations of politicians will be coming from that pool.
As for the vile Media, we have the economic power to destroy them through cancelling of subscriptions and plans, and boycotting their advertisers (a two-fer, since many companies will already be under financial stress due to Obama care; we can destroy them from the other side.)
So perhaps we are having the wrong argument here; Obamacare will fail and cause a massive dislocation in the American economy, but will not change the political calculus of a national two party system. Obamacare may well be the wedge that opens the political process that allows the American people to escape from the straight jacket of the Progressives (and Benghazi, by delegitimizing the Obama Administration the way Watergate delegitimized Nixon, will knock away any base of moral authority that the Administration could claim).
The republicans should pick up at least the average of 32 house seats and six senate seats that the party out of power for six years has picked up since 1900. Maybe more given a lot of people are going to be pissed about the tax. Obama loaded up all the goodies before his reelection on purpose. The bills now come due and people will see that he outright lied about the cost in jobs and taxes.
But as for the republicans, the tea party has been a real problem. Not that the ideas of lower taxes, or even the religious ideas of some supporters are an issue. It is that the tea party seems to back morons. You can be right to life, you can be for fiscal responsibility and not nominate some of the complete idiots that the tea party has forced on the republican party. The republicans would have had seven more senators had the tea party not nominated so many not ready for prime time, or never will be ready for prime time, candidates. As a life long republican I hate the tea party, not because of the ideas, but because of the execution. You all seem like democrats in disguise and are as responsible for the europization of my country as the most liberal of democrats. Either grow up as a movement and stop forcing morons on the party or please just leave.
Taxed Enough Already , dont see much religious hoodoo there. It is the Dems and the mainstream media that made gays, vaginas and big bird election issues. No republican proposed any legislation on any of these matters. The fact that so many think the tea party is interested in anything but a smaller government that doesn’t spend more than its’ revenue shows how power full big media is . But they aren’t so great on non-national campaigns, so hopefully their incessant lying wont be as valuable in 2014.
Again, it is not the ideas but the execution that are the real issue with the tea party. They keep nominating and supporting the Aikens, the Sharron Angles, the witch Christine O’Donnell and others of that ilk and giving away elections to the democrats. All elections that they would have won. That is six or seven senate seats alone the last couple of elections. Nominate politicians who share your philosophy, that is fine. But the moron factor has happened far too often. Like I said get your act together or you may as well be a liberal democrat as that is the only agenda you have advanced.
Dont get all your info from Big Media.
Todd Akin was democrat Claire McCaskill opponent of choice. She is thought to have contributed to his campaign and gotten dems to vote for him in the primary (this is possible because MIssouri republicans have open primaries).
The tea party backed Sarah Steelman. Without getting rid of open primaries crap like this will happen again, and without the tea party the repubs dont stand a chance.
This is a discourse that I hear repeated again and again.
Fine, let’s gloss over the holes in the logic and concede that is true that all these small business will have all these enormous problems.
Then, the best thing for business and jobs would be to leave things as they were before, with no mandate to provide insurance.
Question, what would all the people in those low-paying jobs without insurance do when they get ill? Just wither and die? Is that the conservative solution?
The problem is the cost of healthcare. If a reform doesn’t reduce the price of healthcare then it doesn’t help at all (like Obamacare) . Healthcare in the USA is expensive because no one shops for reasonably priced care, instead they just take whatever is offered and let their insurance company pay. Try watching : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uPdkhMVdMQ
to see what the differences can be . Or look at lasik eye surgery. Because insurance doesn’t cover cosmetic surgery lasik prices have declined markedly.
If medical cost come down so do insurance costs. Allowing people to choose the coverage they want (as Obamacare does not) also reduces costs. I don’t want maternity care (being male), sex change coverage, drug addiction care or physchiatric help; but my state (and Obamacare) mandate that I buy this useless crap.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. Lasik, liposuction, etc are not medically necessary procedures – you don’t have to have them for your well-being – and as such the demand for these procedures is what economists call “elastic.” In other words, demand is much higher at lower prices. However, the price elasticity of demand for medically necessary care is much lower, and is almost perfectly inelastic for emergency care.
That the pricing of healthcare depend on the people not be willing to “shop around” seems a very feeble proposition to me.
It is however true that the ever-rising cost is a problem. Real world comparison, unfortunately for the conservative position, point to the fact that healthcare costs less were it is either paid by the government or directly provided by the government. This is partly due to bargaining power, partly to the dreaded rationing.
Perhaps there are better solutions not yet tried; however, if you expect that any scarce service which may make the difference between living or dying is going to self-regulate its pricing in a market-oriented way, then you are dreaming hard.
“Question, what would all the people in those low-paying jobs without insurance do when they get ill? Just wither and die? Is that the conservative solution?”
Yes. The PPACA (aka “Obamacare”) was, in the 1990′s, the GOP’s answer to the Clinton proposal for healthcare reform; implementing it at the state level was also the only notable achievement of Mitt Romney during his gubernatorial administration in Massachusetts. Yet, they’re now claiming that their own policy is going to be cataclysm and will probably result in the US turning into a communist state. So, they have no alternative policy to fix the problems unique to the market for health insurance.
Thus, their de facto policy is to let people unable to afford insurance, or those declined coverage due to a preexisting condition(s), die.
This analysis is completely off the mark. First, the direct cost of insuring to existing insured will come down, not go up. Only thing that is down is the administrative cost of insurance company and possibly their profits. Obamacare requires insurance companies to spend 80 cents of every dollar collected as premium on health care. This leaves them 20 cents for their admin costs, CEO salaries and profits. Before Obamacare, insurance companies were spending only 65 cents on insured’s health care, keeping 35 cents for admin costs, CEO salaries and profit. So Obamacare forces insurance companies to eliminate inefficiencies in their operations. For example, spend less money to hire staff whose only job is to deny insurance claims, and spend more money on preventive care, that will reduce cost and improve overall health in the future.
Small business owners will benefit fro increased productivity of their employees, due to improved health. This effect may be realized in the long run, but it is sure to happen. As a country with no universal healthcare (prior to Obamacare) our population is less healthy than those with universal healthcare, depite the fact that our healthcare costs are the highest. Obamacare will reverse this trend in the long term.
Now about the 50-employee threshold. It will not affect the overall economy. Suppose Joe Schmo owns a small business with 49 employees. His demand grows, ad he needs to hire one more person. Suppose that to avoid providing coverage to him employees, he refuses to hire the additional person needed to meet the growing demand. That is his choice, but if he decides not to hire the 50th person, the customer will take his business somewhere else. Maybe an entrepreneur will open a new shop, and will be even able to hire employees away from Joe Schmo. Remember, Joe S. refuses to provide health insurance to his employees, so they are not going to be very happy about it, and will leave for the employer who does.
You see Joe Schmo, and his ilks, think that they hire employees and thus create jobs. In fact the ultimate job creator is not Joe Schmo, but the customer, who creates the demand, that allows Joe to hire that person to meet the demand. If there were no demand, do you think Joe Schmo would hire someone. No, Joe is not a job creator, he is a profit seeker (and there is nothing wrong with that). And his profits are created by fulfilling customer demands, not by hiring people. Hiring people is not the end, but the means.
I have to also respond to the post of Adina Kutnicki of Israel (he posted a response to post #1 on Nov 24, at 12:17 pm.) He is someone with a “successful corporate tax practice in NYC/NJ area…” If he and his professional colleagues decide to close their businesses due to Obamacare, I would consider it to be the BEST unintended consequence of enacting it (Obamacare). You see, the likes of Mr. Kutnicki have earned billions of dollars, by ensuring that companies like GE, BOEING, and APPLE pay little or no taxes.
The cost will come down? LOL. Just like every other governmant mandate program in history?
Honestly, it was BS and everyone, including Obama, knew it when he said it. It is a massive giveaway to the minority community, which will cost in the trillions. Only a moron would believe that you can add 30 million people and there be no massive increase in taxes and massive decrease in services for those who have health care already. Honestly, that is the problem in this country. We never have an honest debate, and it is people like Obama and you who make it impossible by not talking about reality.
It is doubtful that costs will decline due to the PPACA, but the law will, at least to some extent, slow the rate of growth in healthcare costs. Why? Well…
- It forces health insurance companies to spend at least 80% of their revenue on medical care, rather than overhead and profits;
- It will expand coverage to most of those currently uninsured, meaning that they will be able to get routine care, and will (by and large) no longer wait until they have an acute (and costly) medical crisis before seeking emergency treatment;
- Along the same lines, it will massively reduce hospitals’ huge problem of non-paying patients, as well as those who use the ER for primary care for lack of other options;
- It requires insurance companies to cover preventative care at little or no cost to consumers, which study after study shows is much more cost effective (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say) over the long run.
In summary, at the end of the day, it’s cheaper on the whole to cover the uninsured, because we’re already paying for them anyways (providers shift costs onto those who do have insurance and/or have sufficient income to pay very expensive medical bills out of pocket). We’re just doing so in an incredibly expensive and inefficient way, and one which carries terrible human as well as financial costs.
In an honest debate, you would acknowledge that the prior to Obamacare, the cost of the uninsured, 30 million in your estimate, was being paid indirectly by taxpayers. You see, these 30 million uninsured people used emergency rooms when they fell sick. The hospitals had to bear the cost of non-payment, and then pass on the cost to other users, and ultimately it was paid by everyone. Both G.W. Bush and Mitt Romney argued that emergency room was available to people who did not have insurance.
Mitt and W were right about that. But it is a lousy, costly, and ineffective way to delver health care. In this model, there were externalities, meaning, businesses were incurring a cost that they were not paying, but the public at large who was paying it. Obamacare prevents this, by requiring that businesses (50+ employees) pay their fair share of health care costs. Some of these businesses not only not pay their fair share of health care cost, they also hire tax attorneys like Adina Kutnicki to cut down the taxes they pay to the government.
People voted in this this election about which health care model they like better: the one that relies on emergency room visits, or the one where preventive health care is important. Get used to Obamacare; it is here to stay. BTW, the same was said about Medicare in 1965, oh how it was going to scuttle economic growth, but guess what? It is the most effieicnt insurance program in the country, and it is very popular.
I will be glad to debate on facts.
“Suppose Joe Schmo owns a small business with 49 employees.” The problem is not with companies with slightly fewer than 50 employees, upon which you needlessly elaborate: the problem is with companies with 50 or more employees.
If you do not understand that imposing ENORMOUS additional costs on having full-time employees is a POWERFUL incentive to reduce the number of full-time employees a company has, you need to study a concept called Cause And Effect.
“You see, the likes of Mr. Kutnicki have earned billions of dollars, by ensuring that companies like GE, BOEING, and APPLE pay little or no taxes.” Since you are such an expert on who actually creates jobs, I would think that you’d understand that a company’s CUSTOMERS pay its taxes. But that concept, too, seems to be one you need to study.
The cause and effect is only one step in the analysis. This happens at the individual level. But economy is the aggregate of individuals. Here you have to carefully note that when Denny’s says that it will have to close its restauranrs due to Obamacare, that is fine. Denny’s chooses to do that. But then, the old customers of the now defunct Denny’s go to other restaurants, like Applebees, IHOP etc. So, in an open market economy, the loss in GDP due to closing of Denny’s will be offset by increase in GDP due to more business for Applebee and IHOP. Eventually, employees from closed Denny’s locations will find employment in Applebee, IHOP or other new restaurants tha will open up to cater to old Denny’s customers. The aggregate demand is not affected. So don’t hold your breath for economy to tank due to Obamacre.
Ayn Rand’s fantasy has been oversold, and has never been more outdated. In her world, John Galt closed his factory because there were too many takers, and he was the maker. Today if the CEO of Apple applies the same logic and closes Apple’s productio, its competitors like Samsung will welcome that decision with glee and say “Go ahead, make my day.”
So if some employer in your area says that he will have to fire people due to Obamacare, just call his bluff.
p.s. After the crank owner of Denny’s in Florida tried this stunt, he started to lose business and the head office of Denny’s had to intervene and disassociate itself from thus crazy franchisee.
The threats by right-wing business owners “Go Galt” – to close up shop now that Obama has been reelected – are childish in the extreme. However, they are, of course, welcome to do what they threaten.
And more sensible entrepreneurs will, I’m sure, be more than happy to take that market share off their hands.
Buddy, it’s the Steve Jobs, Henry Fords of this world that make things tick — not the consumer.
Mankind had been standing around for centuries waiting for someone to manufacture the Model T — or the iPhone.
So — for the guys that count — they are NOT fungible/ swappable.
America was the land of opportunity for Edison, Ford, Tesla, Jobs and Rockefeller.
(All of whom it would be well said were difficult — if not nearly impossible to put up with. It’s all a part of their psyches. All of them, BTW, engaged in nefarious activities. Rockefeller’s were so bad that, once he was exposed – a book – it cost him control of his empire. USSC trial)
[ He'd completely corrupted the Ohio legislature, courts, governor, and its delegation to Congress -- and that's just for starters. ]
There was a real reason these business tycoons made it big in America — and note how none of the important economic drivers of the last 150 years has NOT been made in America.
0bama is out to change all of that.
INTERESTING ELECTION 2012 METRICS…
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2012/11/final-2012-presidential-election.html
here:
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2012/11/some-good-news-from-2012-election-for.html
and here:
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2012/11/hey-state-controlled-media-country-is.html
This will go the way of Prohibition. People will simply ignore it. Medical speakeasies will crop up and underground health care will be run by the Mafia. If the people who oppose the Patriot Act and the TSA inspections had a clue how intrusive the Obamacide Lewis they would….and will… be having fits. Speaking of which, I thought the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, said the Constitution guarantees medical privacy?
Nice try. this election was a referendum on Obama and Obamacare. the GOP couldn’t muster the votes. issue decided. please move on to your next wedge issue/scare tactic.
Did you even read the article? The question is whether the democrats will pay a price in 2014 when the bills are coming due. Given that on average since 1900 the party out of power for six years gians 32 house seats and 6-7 senate seats, I would say that democrats would be feeling the hammer no matter what happened with health care or anything else. Which by the way also goes to your stupid ‘referendum’ comment too. Historically it is nearly impossible to knock a president out of power in the fourth year of a party in power. It only happened once. So honestly anyone with a brain who knows history of the presidency would attribute what happened in 2012 much more to that than anything else. Hell, the democrats got their butts kicked only two years before, at historic levels, so to read any more into 2012 shows ignorance more than anything else. But back to the topic of the article that you ignored. My guess is that democrats will lose much more than the historic number of 32 house and 6 senate seats given unhappiness with the cost parts of Obamacare which Obama purposefully had come into effect AFTER he ran in 2012.
The fear has always been that if you don’t manage to kill universal coverage before it goes into effect then you’ll find that Americans, like Canadians and Australians and the Dutch and everyone else will find that they like it.
So your question is, is 2014 early enough that the “hey this is nice” effect hasn’t kicked in yet.
That is another question entirely. Eventually, yes a lot of people will become reliant on it. Though the question as it is in europe is how can you pay for it? You can only kick the can down the road on the IOUs on spending all this money of these programs without paying for them. Eventually the Ponzi scheme collapses. But all of that is long term. Short term all the goodies were delivered already and the costs start to come due in 2014, and honestly the democrats are in huge danger of massive losses that year. As I have pointed out historically a party in power for six years almost always has pretty massive losses. Their people do not show, and the other party will be frothing at the mouth. If you thought 2010 was bad, 2014 should if history means anything be a huge setback for the democrats and blow the whole demographic gloating out of the water completely. You will see the effects even sooner. Try corralling democrats like Mary Landrieu to do anything that Obama wants will be nearly impossible as she already will see the writing on the wall.
Read the article? That’s funny. It’s written by a right winger. What else is he going to say?
Yeah, read the article or sound like an idiot if you try and comment on it and say things totally unrelated like the guy I quoted.
One thing that I am learning though is how bitter liberals are. In this forum and others, and with Obama and other officials, I have not ever seen such smug winners. Whos idea of compromise is that the other side will finally ‘come to their senses and become liberals’. About the most obnoxious group of people I have ever seen.
Yes, indeed, Obamacare will cause catastrophic damage to businesses. And that will be in the news as much as the millions of people who have been unemployed for years have been in the news. That is, not at all.
The fatal flaw in this analysis is its dependence on the media reporting what’s going on! Which they will not do when it makes (their fellow) Democrats look bad. And, alas, for millions and millions and millions of Americans, if it’s not on ABC / CBS / NBC news, it just ain’t happening.
When the Heritage Foundation came up with the idea of universal health coverage based on private insurance and supported by a universal mandate in the ’90s they argued that it would give American business a level playing field with businesses in the rest of the world where there is also universal coverage.
So did something change in 20 years or maybe, just maybe, your party picked the other side and is now promoting the idea that the sky is falling because if it doesn’t then you have to admit that opposing it is pure politics not honest policy.
“MY party”? I don’t belong to a party. Your arrogant assumption disqualifies you from ever expressing another opinion I will consider worthy of any attention. But you have a nice life, buddy!
Surely they will know if they lost their job. And if they didn’t lose their job, then life is still good. Do I need the media to tell me how my life is going?
I find willful stupidity difficult to deal with. Buh-bye.
I mean didn’t we already have an election and a Supreme Court case in a Republican Court about Obamacare? Didn’t Obamacare and the Democrats win? I mean isn’t this like saying that how the Giants winning the Super Bowl will make the Jets the primer NFL team in the Country?
So basically this writer is openly rooting for millions of job losses because of ObamaCare so that his political party can gain control back. First off,that is pathetic. Second, it won’t work. Anyone who reads history knows that the further we slip into recession, the more people will become to rely on the government. It will create further governmental expansion. So let us all root for great prosperity over the next 4 years. Wouldn’t that be better?
Obamacare will break the Health Care System as we know it.
Democrats should get the blame for it since they were the ones that voted for it.
But don’t underestimate the ignorance of the American Public after all look at who they just elected.
The health care system as we know it sucks the big one. Please break it.
The current system works well for the minority of affluent workers who already have employer-provided health insurance coverage and don’t have a problem paying for it. For everyone else though, not so much. Of course, the reactionary Republicans don’t care about them.
I suggest that the republicans in congress begin a vigorous push to extend Obamacare to ALL US citizens, with only one exception, and make sure to include those in government.
The one exception would be US military personnel – they have enough problems as it is without adding to their troubles.
Aside from that very specific catagory, EVERY citizen in and out of the government should have to abide by the same regulations and criteria that the government has foisted off on the rest of us – and this should include all government employees from the president on down to the local dog catcher.
So, this means all of those congressional aides – they gotta go to the same system we do and no more government exemption.
Those congress critters – they gotta go to private practices from now on, no more going to government doctors at military bases.
The SCOTUS – send their wrinkled a$$es to the same system we have to deal with, and make sure Chief Betrayer John Roberts has to be first in line for the rectal exam.
All of those waivers Obama granted – void them.
Make HIM explain why such a wonderful system the unions lobbied for is just not good enough for the unions to have to live by!
All of those businesses that got waivers – void them.
Yes, this is going to run some of those businesses into the ground, but the sooner and sharper the pain the sooner everyone’s undivided attention can be focused on the problem.
Make EVERYONE live under the same rules for a change and see how fast certain miscreants change their tune.
Give it to them good and hard and attach the necessary legislation to whatever convenient bill HAS to pass.
Any democrat that squeals needs to be challenged to go in front of the tv cameras and explain precisely WHY their specific exemption should stand.
Then they should have the word ‘hypocrit’ permanently tattooed into their foreheads.
Ummm… Hate to burst your bubble, but one of the provisions in the PPACA is that, beginning January 1, 2014, the Congresscritters will ONLY be getting their insurance through the exchanges the law provides for, rather than the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program which they currently use. Good idea though!
Not going to disagree – but I would like to know where to look in that 2,700 page bill for the reference you make to congress critters having to live by the same law the rest of us have to abide by instead of going to Bethesda or some similar facility.
The point stands, however, that if we make EVERYONE have to live by this law then we drastically improve the odds that the socialists will be forced to change it simply in the interests of keeping their jobs as congress critters.
Here you go:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ148/html/PLAW-111publ148.htm
From section 1312:
“The only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are (I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or (II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act).”
“instead of going to Bethesda or some similar facility”
Wait… Isn’t Bethesda Naval Hospital a GOVERNMENT-RUN FACILITY?!?! Are you admitting that the government is capable of, and does at this very moment, provide excellent medical care in 100% publicly-owned and operated hospitals? Heresy, I say! You filthy anti-American socialist pinko commie!
Since when have these congress critters accepted that they have to abide by the law? I can guarantee these corrupt bastards will find a way to sidestep this law for themselves.
As for Bethesda, it is a naval hospital – OF COURSE the military will have such facilities! Given their responsibility, it’d be ludicrous to assume otherwise, and generally the military is good at certain specific tasks.
In this case, this particular facility has been the choice of government leeches for decades now and so it undoubtedly has the very best, very latest medical technology government money taken from taxpayers can buy – and no expense has been spared.
Do you honestly believe they will give that up?
Doesn’t mean you, as one of the great unwashed, will ever have access to it, and I completely believe they will figure a way to classify it as part of their plan.
The name will change but the game will stay the same.
ObamaCare is just part of the cost of doing business. Kind of like the price of gas going up or any of a lot of other things. As far as low paying jobs, this is less expensive than when the minimum wage went from $5.65 to $7.25, and somehow all those denny’s, mcdonalds, and so on kept doing business.
Obamacare operates as a flat poll tax on wage labor.
Its the same per hour whether you’re earning $35/hr or $9/hr.
The numbers for a single employee, without dependents, run towards $ 9,000/ annum.
There are 2,000 work hours in a typical year. (No overtime, some holidays, some sick time)
So the bump is $ 9,000/ 2,000 or $ 4.50 per hour.
That bumps Mr. $35/ hour up to $39.50.
It bumps Mr. $9/ hour up to $13.50. Which means that this fellow must be terminated. He was worth, at best $10.50 per hour. Now, his employer has to go into his pocket $ 3/ hour — and CANNOT pass that cost on to his customers.
So, it’s the NAM community, Barry’s voting bloc, that will necessarily be laid off in droves.
Of course, all of these factors are amplified for the twenty-something new hires. They can’t pencil out no matter what.
This is exactly the reason why Europeans find that they can’t get a stable job until their late twenties/ early thirties.
It also explains the NAM riots. They, on the economics, are the least competitive labor on the market. So, generally, they work off the books.
It’s estimated that Spain, Italy and Greece have massive ‘black economies.’ (off the books)
Hold on a second, whatever the cost of insurance, and I’m not looking it up now, the penalty for a business of 50 people or more not buying it is $2000, with the first 30 people free.
So $4.50/9*2= $1
$1 per hour not $4.50
The penalty is far, far less than the coverage…
Meaning, that the employee will get no coverage — as the employer pays the penalty.
That would be your best case.
Except, employers are opting for trimming hours to limbo under 30.
Decades ago, when I was an employer in Hawaii, which had state mandated health care for anyone working over 20 hours a week, the rule was to never hire any young person full time.
I simply had a slew of part-timers. My competitors did the same.
It was impossible for businessmen such as myself to pass on such an expense in our product prices. We were in no position to ‘eat’ the expense, either.
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Eventually, the penalty/ tax will ramp ever higher… blowing even your calculus out of the water.
The $ 9,000 figure comes from the latest pricing — calculated based upon the inclusions that Obamacare mandates for qualifying programs.
So you have options: a $ 2,000 tax, the USSC has determined it’s a tax, that confers no benefit upon employees; or a $ 9,000 tab (plus or minus) that meets the standard — but which causes the marginal employee to lose his job entirely; or an employer who refuses to expand — this particular class of employer is responsible for 95% of job growth in the private economy. (They’re on ‘strike’ now, and you can see the result in the BLS numbers and welfare stats.)
Employees so poorly paid, in such an uncompetitive field that their employer will prefer the penalty will also be low income enough that the government will subsidize them to buy their own insurance, a small part of which the employer will have paid for with that penalty.
“Eventually, the penalty/ tax will ramp ever higher”
A few people in the thread above said that ObamaCare is designed to force total government control of health care. When I pointed at an overview of the law and said “show me how” all that anyone came up with was that some day the Democrats will take over the universe and replace ObamaCare with a single payer system – in other words they were lying and there is nothing in the law which does that.
So once again with “eventually the penalty will ramp ever higher” we see here that a discussion of what the law will will actually do isn’t dire enough so you have to make up an imaginary future in Congress decides to change the law in a rash way.
Well if your analysis of the law has to include “well one day they’ll make it much worse” then you’re conceding that the law isn’t bad.
This is just pompous, arrogant thinking by those small business owners who are currently on ‘strike’. Strike against what? Too much regulation, Obamacare? As if these owners, takers etc are the ones who do a favor by hiring people. You do it for your own profit, your own benefit. Oh please, get real. The reason you are not hiring, is because there is no demand. And the demand is low because GOP has opposed stimulus for getting the economy out of slump. Nearly 600,000 jobs at the state level could have been saved had GOP been a bit more sensible. Well, GOP paid a price in the election.
There is too much Ryandian thinking has settled on these people who identify themselves as ‘makers.’ The fantasy and fiction of Ayn Rand doesn’t work in real life.
You ever heard someone at your job say “I would retire but I have to keep working because of the insurance”? With ObamaCare, they can now retire, get insurance from either medicaid or a subsidized insurance exchange and make room for a younger worker to take their job. That’s the way its supposed to work.
Riiiggghhhhht…..pure B.S.
My parents are both on Medicare and are finding their out of pocket expenses going up.
If anything, they are having to work harder to make ends meet now!
The idea that they can now gracefully retire and not worry about their insurance needs would be laughable if it weren’t such a serious issue.
Also, it will actually help small businesses. My definition of small business is less than 50 employees. They will be in a much better position to compete against bigger companies. Spread the wealth. My have a few big companies when we can have a bunch of small ones.
OH yeah. There is a LIE in that crap up there too. The article claims that the CBO projects the loss of 800,000 jobs. Not true. The CBO projects 800,000 people will leave their job willingly to retire with the help of ObamaCare. That will free up those 800,000 jobs for other people.
Stop not lying, don’t you know where you are?
Actually it feels so strange that now that the election is over, people on this website are more honest (though you caught a big lie) and don’t ban at the first sign of disagreement.
I guess that’s how Republicans handle elections, they’re not capable of being honest until they’re over, then everything changes for a short time. We’ll never convince them that honesty is the best policy though, they’ll tell you that they’re victims and that Democrats are pure evil who lie and are racist and worship Satan and that Republicans have to lie as much as possible so they won’t be victimized.
Oldsters are heading back to work because of Barry. Their participation rates are going UP.
The rocketing unemployment stays with the INEXPERIENCED youth.
In hard times, no employer has any rationale for a training budget.
Take a gander at the job offers on Craigslist. To the one, they all demand that applicants already have experience — and that the hiring official is not willing to waste one moment cross training ANYONE.
This is true in Europe. Hence, 55% unemployment rates for 20-somethings in Spain — college degrees or not. (!)
What people do not get is the issues that are going to occur when 30 million are dumped on medicade. Right now doctors get paid almost nothing for medicade paitents and a lot of doctors refuse to take the cases. They lose money on a lot of them, but look at it as charity work. Obamacare CUTS these already low reimbursements. Estimates are that 15% of hospitals will go under with these new regulations. Many doctors are retiring as well and there is a huge shortage. Just as one example do you know how many Urologists graduated last year for all of north america, including the US and Canada? 240. It is the same throughout medicine.
So basically what the government is saying is the equivilent of ‘good news, we are giving everyone a limo to take them to work. The bad news is that we only have 10 limos for the entire city. Get in line.’ It is unowrkable, absent major changes. Are some of you too dumb to understand that?
” Are some of you too dumb to understand that?”
Dumb…willfully ignorant…same results.
You can’t fix stupid.
This should work out nicely for corporations…. Obamacare is going to keep their competitors small and vulnerable to takeover.
With rare exception, smallish companies are never bought out by the competition.
They just fold up. Period. Stop.
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You don’t have to guess what’ll happen: just look at Europe. It’s a sea of one-man wonders in the trades — and crony connected big contractors with fat unions — with both management and unions essentially made apart of Big Government.
There are no medium sized fish in that pond.
“You don’t have to guess what’ll happen: just look at Europe. It’s a sea of one-man wonders in the trades — and crony connected big contractors with fat unions — with both management and unions essentially made apart of Big Government.
There are no medium sized fish in that pond.”
Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. The backbone of the largest economy in the Eurozone – Germany – is the Mittlestand, or small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are heavily concentrated in the machine tool, auto parts, and electronic equipment sectors.
And if YOU poked underneath the covers…
You’d find out that these export powerhouses are teaming with firms — just under the threshold of painful taxation.
In the other comparable societies these firms merge into larger business enterprises.
The last decade has been a hot house for Germany’s export industries. So it’s not a model that will stand up.
The very nature of the rigged exchange rate — which is what we call the Euro (€) — has puffed up the profits of the very sector you so proudly hail.
The ONLY reason they are so healthy is because, via currency games, they’ve been able to export — massively — to customers unable to pay good money for their products. It’s this economic failure which is behind all of the contretemps in Europe — and the PIIGS.
They bought those German, Austrian and French machine tools and heavy equipment — effectively on credit. They then built politically expedient show projects like the massive subway system underneath Madrid that are fantastic money pits, now and forever.
The total list of blown monies / vanity projects would run many, many pages.
Greek bridge across the Corinth ( a bleeder )
Spanish airports ( too many, and too close together )
Freeways all over southern Europe ( brutally expensive )
Solar subsidies ( Germany was, at one time, the worlds largest PV exporter ! These destroyed Spain’s national accounts. Books are now being written on the folly. )
In sum: you’re disproved.
European governments and crony capitalists have run their books into the ground. 0bama intends to follow them in haste.
You said that there are no medium-sized enterprises in Europe:
“There are no medium sized fish in that pond.”
I corrected you, and you went off on an unrelated tear about how the Euro is a flawed construction – which is an assessment I largely agree with. You are correct in your observation that French and German firms made big profits exporting goods to the poorer nations of the Eurozone, expenditures which were financed by loans from French and German banks. You are also correct in observing that this was a credit bubble. These are all well known facts and not at all controversial.
You are also arguing against an imaginary strawman with respect to so-called “Green Energy” projects. I have never stated or even alluded to supporting these backwards modes of energy production. I am an old-school, FDR Democrat; I support developing and utilizing our vast natural gas and oil resources to the fullest extent possible. And, interestingly enough, since 2008, domestic production of oil and natgas has increased at a very rapid rate, reversing decades of decline. I also support energy efficiency standards to cut wasteful demand, hopefully bringing the current account balance on energy to a break-even point within 10 years.
Likewise, I am a huge supporter of nuclear energy, and would like to see the construction of 100 new gen III+ reactors with all due haste, eventually expanding the number of operating reactors to 500 by 2050. This would create millions of jobs directly, and the abundant electrical power provided would be a gigantic boost to US manufacturing across the board. Unfortunately, neither party supports such an ambitious and technology progressive agenda.
Don’t get cocky, kid.
For those who’ve experienced ‘tribal bloc’ or ‘ethnicity’ voting… the norm in Democrat machine politics… it’s obvious that your ultimate conclusion is wrong.
Yes, the economics will be terrible. The medical results will be lousy.
But, as Mugabe shows, the Big Man can ride the blame game to the end of the ride — all the way down to the bottom.
Famously, infamously, Mugabe never lost his tribal base… and never went outside it. Imploding the national economy, and all of the hardships he created, did not personally nor politically affect the despot.
Barry has brought Chicago to the Potomac. He will not lose his base. It’s actually increasing.
This is one consequence of permitting low information voters; which, BTW, were exactly who the Founding Fathers denied the vote to.
This nation has taken the notion of universal suffrage so far that we’re actually letting illegal immigrants into the voting booth — and in numbers large enough to affect the outcome.
There are enough oddities WRT the 2012 tabulation to make an observer think that the President was self-selected; and that his control of the US Census database permitted him to entirely pervert the outcome. Such gambits would fit his track record — and that of the Chicago machine, whence he was spawned.
What happened in Russia and Venezuela has now happened here.
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No, the big change that’s going to happen by 2016 is a complete re-write of the MSM’s economic model. They either attain massive, direct, support from the Federal Government or they must gain the patronage of crony capitalists — like Warren Buffett.
(Because of long standing legal requirements, the MSM actually is already subsidized by government. One must publish/advertise for all manner of legal purposes: public contracts, auctions, notices — even service of process. Such words are charged top rates.)
If this is the case, one wonders why the GOP has fought and continues to fight the PPACA tooth-and-nail? Of course, the reason is that Republican strategists know very well that the public at large is still quite ignorant about the provisions in the law (due in no small part to a huge misinformation campaign), but once it’s implemented fully, it will become hugely popular. Never again will Americans have to fear being denied coverage due to a preexisting condition, or having their coverage rescinded as soon as they fall ill, or be forced to go to the ER because they can’t afford a doctor’s office visit. Hospitals will benefit as well, as the law dramatically reduces their enormous problem of non-paying uninsured patients (this is why they agreed to cuts in Medicare reimbursements in the negotiations).
Further reforms will need to be made, but this is definitely an improvement over the current and highly dysfunctional system of employer-provided health insurance. Finally, I would like to point out that those fretting about paying for subsidies for Obamacare are already de facto subsidizing the uninsured when they fall ill – we’re just doing so in the most expensive, least efficient way possible.
The very nature of its provisions allows K-Street to write and rewrite the rules from now on.
All of the brutal details are being left to ‘experts’ — with an interest in the outcomes.
=========
All of the European nations made your arguments. They then watched their health budgets entirely blow out — every time exceeding their worst imaginings.
The elimination of price discrimination creates super-heated demand. In every nation, waiting lists arise. And, of course, the medical talent flees. In Britain, it’s astonishing to see just how few Englishmen are doctors. When faced with politicized compensation — they simply left for America or Canada.
That dynamic is riven through 0bamacare. After all, a staggering sum is being subtracted from Medicade — just so that 0bamacare looks better on paper.
You just can’t fool all the people all of the time.
As for the politics: the employees earning their wage in the health sector quickly come to see that they ought to vote en bloc for Democrats. This bias then leads directly to a one-party state — a wholly corrupting situation.
Having spent decades living in a one-party state — and witnessing the fantastical level of corruption therein — I can confirm things get rapidly out of hand.
The number one problem in the Third World is just such one-party rule. Japan and Mexico come to mind. Corruption there is pandemic.
BTW, the enormous problem of uninsured patients is massively concentrated in our illegal immigrants — particularly anchor babies. The expense in California has had three governors in a row tearing their hair out. Without that one drain — the system’s cash flow would revert back to what it was thirty years ago: viable.
For illegals, it really is a zero-sum game. They walked across the border — and immediately tapped the medical wealth created by another nation. This, not by just a few, but by so many that the entire nation’s accounts are blowing up.
A welfare state and open borders can never pencil out. Modern transportation safety means that many multiples of America’s population can realistically come here.
When queried, a while back, more than half of Germany, Britain and France stated that they’d love to move to America — if only they could get their affairs in order. (!)
Now imagine how attractive America is elsewhere.
“All of the European nations made your arguments. They then watched their health budgets entirely blow out — every time exceeding their worst imaginings.”
Not one European nation spends anywhere near what the United States does – 17.5% of GDP – on healthcare. The closest are France and The Netherlands at about 12% of GDP, and both of those nations manage to achieve both universal coverage and a higher life expectancy than the US. I’ve lived in Europe, and I’ve never met a single European who would trade their system for the American one. My out-of-pocket cost for a doctor’s office visit in France was €7 (the unsubsidized price is €23, a bit more for a house call or specialist consultation), yet the French system consistently ranks as the best in the world. The bottom line is we’re paying more than any other country in the world for healthcare, and getting very little value for the money.
“The elimination of price discrimination creates super-heated demand. In every nation, waiting lists arise.”
Nonsense. Nobody goes to get treatment just for fun. Demand for medically necessary procedures is based on the population’s actual need for such services. There are waiting lists for certain elective and non-urgent procedures (i.e., cataract surgery, knee replacement, etc.) in SOME nations, particularly Britain and Canada, but you’re deluding yourself if you think those procedures aren’t de facto rationed here as well – it’s just done through the brutal mechanism of having tens of millions uninsured.
“After all, a staggering sum is being subtracted from Medicade — just so that 0bamacare looks better on paper.”
I think you mean Medicare, and this is, at best, a half-truth. The PPACA does cut Medicare reimbursements, but this was something which the providers agreed to in the negotiations over the bill, since the legislation dramatically reduces the number of uninsured patients who can’t pay their hospital bills.
“The number one problem in the Third World is just such one-party rule. Japan and Mexico come to mind. Corruption there is pandemic.”
Japan is the third largest economy in the world, and ranks 14th in the Corruption Perceptions Index (the US scores worse, coming in at 24th). You are now just making stuff up.
“When queried, a while back, more than half of Germany, Britain and France stated that they’d love to move to America — if only they could get their affairs in order.”
Citation, if you please.
Mandatory socialized medicine against the will of the people is one of the reasons Americans from each state filed petitions for secession right after the elections. SECESSION: WHAT’S IN A NAME? I no longer trust our electoral process; news venues; entertainment industry, schools or courts, and I darn sure do not trust our federal government “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. … READ MORE: http://bwcentral.org/2012/11/11751/
All of us that supported Obama and support Democrats do so with eyes wide open. Yes, we are taking your country from you and making it the way we want it. It’s just the people you don’t want taking it are 200 million strong. Of the people, by the people, for the people.
Wrong – they were only 61,173,739 or 50.5% of the vote (according to the blovington host article).
58,167,260 or 48.0% voted against this B.S..
There are about 313 million US citizens.
A large percentage of the voters stayed home, and almost half of those who did vote chose to vote AGAINST Obummer.
You don’t get to claim the allegiance of the roughly 194 million or so who didn’t bother to vote or were not yet eligible to vote for whatever reason.
Those who sat out the election will unfortunately learn the hard way that elections DO matter as the full disaster that is Obamacare is felt by the general population.
Majority? Mandate? Not so much.
It’s all about election fraud. If elections can be stolen this easily, we no longer have a republic.
Zeke is what you get after only four years of Obama’s Alynskyite propaganda. It is not an election we just had, but a revolution. The oppressed have risen. They have taken it and we can’t have it any more, because we are evil, and therefore we are not among the people of whom he says his government is composed. They will keep it by any means necessary, right Zeke? This is such an old story.
Some people just can’t process. We just had an election in this country. If the people had been angry about the Affordable Care Act they would have tossed out Obama. They not only didn’t do it, they allowed the democrats to add to their majority in the Senate and decrease the GOP majority in the House.
Call it “socialism”. Call it any silly adjective that you want to invent. You’ll find universal healthcare in every country in the developed world. The USA was the last to get on the bandwagon. Are all those countries “socialist”? If they are “socialist” is that wrong? There’s a reason why so many countries have adopted UHC. Its because we aren’t willing to take a chance on private insurance or on the free market system when it comes to our lives and limb.
Its time for some to grow up. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. You can pout like a child and make claims that its “unconstitutional” which require you to ignore an opinion of the US Supreme Court. You can call for its repeal when that’s just not going to happen with the Congress and President we have in office. Or, you can sit down and try and help work out the bugs that exist in the legislation. Its not perfect and parts of it will have to be changed.
Grow up. Stop acting like small children who didn’t get their way.
Republicans in the House will NEVER accept ANY tweaks to Obamacare to make it function better. It is either full repeal or it goes unchanged for 2 or 4 years. If the public wants tweaks, they will have to put Pelosi back in the saddle.
Pelosi in the saddle????? An alarming conjecture!
The very essence of the act is its ability to self-morph: the experts are in charge of ‘implementing’ the act.
In so many words: it’s a blank canvas.
The maladministration — in conjunction with K Street — can make law by fiat.
That’s why 0bamacare is so confusing: every party of interest — save the public — was given its piece of the pie.
( Via K Street lobbyists — themselves larded up with ex-Senators and ex-Representatives )
It’s the clan of perpetual big government against all comers.
It fuses political machines to medicine — birthing a bi-partisan “Medical Machine.”
It is run by and for the K Street interests. That’s one heck of a big tent.
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In the daze of the Soviet Union, their military had an over-arching priority; which led to an absurdly overbuilt military-industrial complex — tilting at windmills, to boot.
We are now on course to insanely overbuild our medical-industrial complex — again tilting at windmills, for we are mortal.
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Left unsaid: the vast bulk of high dollar medicine occurs at deaths door.
0bamacare’s ultimate innovation is to cap that spending.
It’s a policy with a name — but none dare speak it.
The whole point of Obamacare is to get rid of those pesky oldsters who keep insisting on staying alive to collect Social Security – and who refuse to vote for the demonrats.
You want us to stop yelling?
Stop acting like a thief with your hands in everyone else’s pockets!
If you support Obamacare and if you voted for the Democrats, that’s what you are.
Just because you can get what seems to be a majority vote in favor of your policy, or because you can use force to get it implemented, that doesn’t make it justifiable. That’s why we used to have the concept of limited government under the US Constitution.
Oh, and by the way, THIS is how your candidate won.
Disgusting.
Repubs gave pretty much blanket amnesty b4. Now were seen as old white and racist, sexist, or homophobic, or Islam haters…this coming from the left that is the party for the “common middle class”..omg what a crock of bull they can spin….how bigoted is that…..weve learned this lesson in history before the progressive and social eras need capitalism to work…and hurting the capital…hurts the commoner….lol go figure the dimwits in the left will always try but the commoner once he becomes less free becomes the proletariat and war and death ensue….this a talking point of the Marxist nature taken right from their playbook….lol….i say lets begin the drums….im old white and that’s it…stupid Dem libs
We will keep the capitalist part of our system. There is too much greed out there to let it go away. I trust in the greed of the wealthy. They did fine all those years from WWII to 1980 when they were paying a top tax rate of 70%. They will do fine now and in the future. We don’t have to worry about them being greedy enough to CREATE jobs.
You economic dunce: the BIG money was made during WWII.
Just ask Oskar Schindler.
You condemn greed — yet sanction power-lust and regal authority.
Easy money, cronyist money, is made AFTER one secures government support.
Take a gander at The Godfather II. Hyman Roth/ Lee Strasberg repeatedly extolled his corrupt, cronyist relationship with Batista.
In sum: FAT money ONLY occurs AFTER one secures government sanction.
0bamacare will sanction no end of profit mills — acmes of greed.
Even today it’s remarked how doctors graduate to do good — but do well, instead.
LOL….Zeke forgot to call you a racist! He must be slipping…
Making people buy insurance is a bad thing and will be very messy. There’s a much simpler solution and I’m surprised nobody has proposed it. The problem with American healthcare isn’t that people can’t get insurance. The problem is that health care is just too darn expensive. It’s essentially a monopoly owned by the mob. I compare American health care charges to the movie theater snack bar where ten cents worth of popcorn sells for ten dollars.
The answer to our problem isn’t expensive insurance. Here’s the answer: Limit the amount that can be charged for any health care. That way instead of telling 300 million Americans they must buy overpriced insurance, you’re only telling a few hundred thousand health care providers what they can charge. If the government has to subsidize certain options, so be it, but it would be a lot simpler than the present Obamacare debacle.
With costs on a more reasonable basis, everybody could enjoy health care in the same way as they do other utilities like phone service and electric service, etc…and pay for them out of their regular wage.
Even better, universal health care, where everything is negotiated with ONE buyer negotiating the lowest price possible on everything. Drugs too. We don’t need to protect the Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries.
Nope. No negotiating.
“This is the price you can charge. Nothing more. And it’s the SAME price for everybody. Don’t like it? Turn in your license.”
Ahem….Nixon tried price controls.
Didn’t work out so well.
Prior to that, the federal government tried to control prices during WWII – for instance on the price of beef, and if I remember my history correctly the butchers simply ‘discovered’ new cuts of beef and charged appropriately while ignoring the official government mandate on what they could charge previously.
Aside from that, is it REALLY a good idea to have central planners dictating the price of everything from brain surgery to an aspirin?
How’s that central planning working out for the USSR?
Oh, that’s right – that country’s economy collapsed and it doesn’t exist anymore.
When costs go up, but prices remain fixed, you have a meeting of the two called reality.
Given the historical fact of price increases over the past 4 years, I don’t think anyone can claim with an ounce of honesty that prices will not continue on their current trajectory – and if inflation bites as hard as it has done before in our history then that price increase trajectory will end up being quite a bit steeper and very painful.
Then of course you have the built in fact that because of stagnation in pricing under price controls, those medical facilities will not be able to afford to expand or purchase new equipment or attract the best and brightest surgeons (I understand boutique medical centers are being planned around the globe where Americans can go for their surgeries instead of dealing with Obamacare), or pay to expand their medical facilities because there is no way they can raise extra capital.
And what investor in their right mind would sink money into the medical field today?
It’s an all around world class clu$terf#ck no matter how you slice it or how you try to make it work.
FYI my sister-in-law is an ostetrician. She just told me that her overhead costs amount to two hundred dollars an hour. Also they are hamstrung by regulations that make no sense. If they are forced to cut their prices they will go out of business.
No sense argueing with Comrad Zeke. If you stand in his way you will lose your access to health care. The revolution is too important to worry about the health of a few ostructionists.
Millions of people who couldn’t previously afford health care, or were excluded because of existing conditions, will now be able to get health care. As an American who cares about his fellow countrymen
Too bad many of them will not have a job with which to pay for said health insurance…
Too bad they won’t be able to find a doctor who can see them. Use what little money you have to buy a Merck’s Manuel and study home remedies.
I see all this, but I also see collateral damage: If my taxes/insurance/fuel/food bill goes up, my inclination to use cable tv/cell phone/internet goes down. On a limited budget, you cut what is less necessary. If many do this, what happens to the cable company employees? Don’t need them anymore.
You ignore the possibility that the business with 49 employees may be in competition with the business with 51 employees and who wants to keep their employee benefits. Think Costco vs. Wal-Mart. Those who provide benefits willingly because they think it’s the right thing to do now simply have the competitive advantage. The food service and retail industries will have to adjust. Our economy simply cannot go forward with half covered and half uninsured.
Two weeks ago our audit firm gave us almost the identical details. I didn’t write it down and they didn’t have hand outs. Too busy whispering to myself, Holy Crap. Thank you Mr. Rick Moran for putting what they told us in a clearly defined article.
Good analysis. I’m sure you are correct, sir. I just want to make sure. I’ll ask President….. Romney?
Damn you John Roberts! Damn you to He ll!
I keep hearing that the left dismantled the Constitution. Fine. Any once care to tell me where the Drug Prohibition Amendment is?
Or perhaps you would care to tell me why the Republicans of 1914 voted against the Harrison Narcotics Act.
The Republicans are not serious about anything. At all. Anymore.
Trust me it is not Obamacare it is Obamacareless!
hey, remember that time mitt romney ran for president and said he’d kill obamacare the first day then got landslided in the election?
yeah me too!
bwahahahahahaha
final count ~51% to 47%.
can you say ‘mandate’?
I guess you could say that the uncivilized Germanic tribes had a mandate when they finally overwhelmed and dismantled the Roman imperial government. Don’t worry though, everything turned out alright. After about five or six centuries.
When Obama has succeeded in deliberately destroying our economy, aided and abetted by his evil clones and the ignorami, the people, hungry, desperate for all goods and services will take to the streets. Then the mahdi wannabee will call out the police and the military and laugh while the bodies pile up and the FEMA gulags fill. And those who excused him for being not too bright, parentally disadvantaged, inexperienced, ignorant, betrayed or whatever will, too late see that he is a sociopath, an antisocial personality, an insane criminal. And your descendants will pay for your cowardice and sloth with lives of slavery, torture and death under the Sharia Law of his fellow moslems.Won’t you be proud of your Quisling personae then?
Yeah…Canada’s “Medicare For All” is a TOTAL failure – ask any Canadian and they’ll tell you it’s time to Americanize their health system.
And the Scandinavian countries are total basket cases – don’t you know everyone there is figuring out that the way forward is to de-unionize the labor force and dismantle the welfare state?
…Ehh, no? In any case the implementation of Obamacare will serve as a real-world experience to settle certain things about the free-market-vs-government debate. If free-market conservatism’s predictions are correct, Obamacare will lead to hospital nightmares, death panels, poor care, rationing, and horrible red tape among small businesses. If progressivism’s predictions are correct, Obamacare will cover tens of millions of additional Americans with relatively few negative shocks to our economic system.
At least the June 2012 SCOTUS ruling and November 2012 election outcome ensures that Obamacare will be given a fair chance to be implemented. The outcome of its implementation will determine the philosophical course of our socio-econo-political fabric for decades to come.